
Book Ik T W 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



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The Art of Living 



The Art of 

Living 



B Y 



/ 



'Robert Grant 



"t : : 5" 



New York 
Charles Scribner s Sons 

MDCCCXCIX 





41794 

Copyright^ 1895 and 1899, by Charles Scribner's Sons 



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SECOND OOPY. 






Contents 



f 

Income 
Part I I 

Part II 24 

f 

The Dwelling 
Part I 33 

Part II 53 

f 

House-Furnishing and the Commissariat 



Part I 




71 


Part II 


Education 


85 


Parti 




100 


Part II 


Occupation 


118 


Parti 




129 


Part II. 


If 

The Use of Time 


144 


Parti 




162 


Part II 




181 



[v] 



Contents 




f 






The Summer Problem 




Parti 
Part II 


n 


203 
218 


Parti 
Part II 


The Case of Man 


230 

250 


Parti 
Part II 


The Case of Woman 

1 


261 

278 


Part I 
Part II 


The Condu5l of Life 


290 
309 



[vi] 



Income. 
I. 



R 



OGERSjthe book-keeper for the 
past twenty-two years of my 
friend Patterson, the banker, told 
me the other day that he had 
reared a family of two boys and 
three girls on his annual salary of two thousand 
two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the 
boys through college, one through the School of 
Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a li- 
brarian, given one a coming-out party and a trous- 
seau, and that the remaining daughter, a home 
body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine of 
his own and his wife's old age. All this on two 
thousand two hundred dollars a year. 

Rogers told me with perfed: modesty, with just 
a tremor of self-satisfadion in his tone, as though, 
all things considered, he felt that he had man- 
aged creditably, yet not in the least suggesting 
that he regarded his performance as out of the 
common run of happy household annals. He is 
a neat-looking, respedable, quiet, conservative 
Httle man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank, 
invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year 

[ I ] 



The Art of Living 

round, a narrow black necktie in winter, and a 
narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in sum- 
mer, and whose watch is no less invariably right 
to a second. As I often drop in to see Patterson, 
his employer, I depend upon it to keep mine 
straight, and it was while I was setting my chro- 
nometer the other day that he made me the fore- 
going confidence. 

Frankly, I felt as though I had been struck 
with a club. It happened to be the first of the 
month. Every visit of the postman had brought 
me a fresh batch of bills, each one of which was 
a little larger than I had expeded. I was corre- 
spondingly depressed and remorseful, and had 
been asking myself from time to time during 
the day why it need cost so much to live. Yet 
here was a man who was able to give his daugh- 
ter a coming-out party and a trousseau on two 
thousand two hundred dollars a year. I opened 
my mouth twice to ask him how in the name of 
thrift he had managed to do it, but somehow the 
discrepancy between his expenditures and mine 
seemed such a gulf that I was tongue-tied. " I 
suppose,'* he added modestly, "that I have been 
very fortunate in my little family. It must indeed 
be sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thank- 

[2] 



Income 

less child." Gratitude too ! Gratitude and Shakes- 
peare on two thousand two hundred dollars a 
year. I went my way without a word. 

There are various ways of treating remorse. 
Some take a Turkish bath or a pill. Others, while 
the day lasts, trample it under foot, and shut it 
out at night with the bed-clothes. Neither course 
has ever seemed to me exadlly satisfactory or 
manly. Consequently I am apt to entertain my 
self-reproach and reason with it, and when one 
begins to wonder why it costs so much to live, 
he finds himself grappling with the entire pro- 
blem of civilization, and presently his hydra has 
a hundred heads. The first of the month is apt 
to be a sorry day for my wife as well as for me, 
and I hastened on my return home to tell her, 
with just a shadow of reproach in my tone, what 
Mr. Rogers had confided to me. Indeed I saw 
fit to ask, "Why can't we do the same?" 

"We could," said Barbara. 

"Then why don't we?" 

"Because you wouldn't." 

I had been refleding in the brief interval be- 
tween my wife's first and second replies that, in 
the happy event of our imitating Rogers's exam- 
ple from this time forth and forever more, I 

[3] 



The Art of Living 

should be able to lay up over five thousand dol- 
lars a year, and that five thousand dollars a yeat 
saved ior ten years would be fifty thousand dol- 
lars — a very neat little financial nest ^gg. But 
Barbara's second reply upset my calculation ut- 
terly, and threw the responsibility of failure on 
me into the bargain. 

"Mr. Rogers is the salt of the earth, a highly 
respedlable man and, if I am not mistaken, the 
deacon of a church," I remarked not altogether 
relevantly. "Why should we spend four times 
as many thousand dollars a year as he?" 

"I wonder," answered my wife, "if you really 
do appreciate how your friend Mr. Rogers lives. 
I am quite aware that you are talking now for 
effed — talking through your hat as the children 
say — because it's the first of the month and 
you 're annoyed that the bills are worse than 
ever, and I understand that you don't for one 
moment seriously entertain the hope that our 
establishment can be conducted on the same 
basis as his. But I should just like to explain to 
you for once how people who have only twenty- 
two hundred dollars a year and are the salt of 
the earth do live, if only to convince you that 
the sooner we stop comparing ourselves with 

[4] 



Income 

them the better. I say ^we* because in my mo- 
ments of depression over the household expenses 
I catch myself doing the same thing. Our 
butcher's bill for this month is huge, and when 
you came in I was in the throes of despair over 
a letter in the newspaper from a woman who con- 
tends that a good housekeeper in modest circum- 
stances can provide an excellent dinner for her 
family of six persons, including soup, fish, an 
entree, meat, pudding, dessert, and coffee, for 
fifty-three cents. And she gives the dinner, which 
at first sight takes one's breath away. But after 
you prune it of celery, parsley, salted peanuts, 
raisins, red cabbage, salad, and cheese, all there is 
left is bean-soup, cod sounds, fried liver, hot gin- 
gerbread, and apples." 

" I should dine down town, if you set such 
repasts before me," I answered. 

" Yes," said Barbara. " And there is a very 
good point of departure for illustrating the do- 
mestic economies of the Rogers family. Mr. Rog- 
ers does dine down town. Not to avoid the fried 
liver and cod sounds, for probably he is partial to 
them, but because it is cheaper. When you take 
what you call your luncheon, and which is apt to 
include as much as he eats in the entire course of 

[5] 



The Art of Living 

the day, Mr. Rogers dines ; dines at a restaurant 
where he can get a modest meal for from fifteen 
to twenty-five cents. Sometimes it is pea-soup 
and a piece of squash-pie. The next day perhaps 
a mutton-stew and a slice of watermelon, or boiled 
beef and an eclair. Mrs. Rogers and the children 
have a pick-up dinner at home, which lasts them 
very well until night, when they and Rogers sit 
down to browned-hash mutton and a head of 
lettuce, or honey-comb tripe and corn-cake, and 
apple-sauce to wind up with.'' 

" That is n't so very bad." 

" Why, they have a splendid time. They can 
abuse their social acquaintance and discuss family 
secrets without fear of being overheard by the 
servants because they don't keep any servants to 
speak of. Probably they keep one girl. Or per- 
haps Mr. Rogers had a spinster sister who helped 
with the work for her board. Or it may be Mrs. 
Rogers kept one while the children were little ; 
but after the daughters were old enough to do it 
themselves, they preferred not to keep anybody. 
They live extremely happily, but the children 
have to double up, for in their small house it is 
necessary to sleep two in a room if not a bed. 
The girls make most of their dresses, and the boys 

[6] 



Income 

never dream of buying anything but ready-made 
clothing. By living in the suburbs they let one 
establishment serve for all seasons, unless it be 
for the two weeks when Rogers gets his vacation. 
Then, if nobody has been ill during the year, the 
family purse may stand the drain of a stay at the 
humblest watering-place in their vicinity, or a 
visit to the farm-house of some relative in the 
country. An engagement with the dentist is a 
serious disaster, and the plumber is kept at a re- 
spedlable distance. The children go to the public 
schools, and the only club or organization to 
which Mr. Rogers belongs is a benefit associa- 
tion, which pays him so much a week if he is ill, 
and would present his family with a few hundred 
dollars if he were to die. The son who went 
through college must have got a scholarship or 
taken pupils. The girl who married undoubtedly 
made the greater portion of her trousseau with 
her own needle ; and as to the coming-out party, 
some of the effeds of splendor and all the de- 
lights of social intercourse can be produced by 
laying a white drugget on the parlor carpet, the 
judicious use of half a dozen lemons and a mould 
of ice-cream with angel-cake, and by imposing on 
the good nature of a friend who can play the pi- 

[7] 



The Art of Living 

ano for dancing. There, my dear, if you are will- 
ing to live like that, we should be able to get 
along on from twenty-two to twenty-five hun- 
dred dollars quite nicely." 

My wife was perfedlly corred: in her declara- 
tion that I did not seriously entertain the hope of 
being able to imitate Mr. Rogers, worthy citizen 
and upright man as I believe him to be. I cer- 
tainly was in some measure talking through my 
hat. This was not the first time I had brought 
home a Rogers to confront her. She is used to 
them and aware that they are chiefly bogies. I, as 
she knows, and indeed both of us, are never in 
quite a normal condition on the first day of the 
month, and are liable, sometimes the one of us 
and sometimes the other, to indulge in vagaries- 
and resolutions which by the tenth, when the 
bills are paid, seem almost uncalled for or im- 
pradlicable. One thing is certain, that if a man 
earns only twenty-two hundred dollars a year, 
and is an honest man withal, he has to live on it, 
even though he dines when others take luncheon, 
and is forced to avoid the dentist and the plumb- 
er. But a much more serious problem confronts 
the man who earns four times as much as Rogers, 
more serious because it involves an alternative. 

[8] 



Income 

Rogers could not very well live on less if he 
tried, without feeling the stress of poverty. He 
has lived at hard pan, so to speak. But I could. 
Could if I would, as my wife has demonstrated. 
I am perfe6lly right, as she would agree, in being 
unwilling to try the experiment ; and yet the con- 
sciousness that we spend a very large sum of 
money every year, as compared with Rogers and 
others like him, remains with us even after the 
bills are paid and we have exchanged remorse 
for contemplation. 

The moralist, who properly is always with us, 
would here insinuate, perhaps, that Rogers is hap- 
pier than I. But I take issue with him promptly 
and deny the impeachment. Rogers may be hap- 
pier than his employer Patterson, because Patter- 
son, though the possessor of a steam-yacht, has 
a son who has just been through the Keeley cure 
and a daughter who is living apart from her hus- 
band. But there are no such flies in my pot of 
ointment. I deny the superior happiness of Rogers 
in entire consciousness of the moral beauty of his 
home. I recognize him to be an industrious, self- 
sacrificing, kind-hearted, sagacious husband and 
father, and I admit that the pen-pidure which 
the moralist could draw of him sitting by the 

[9] 



The Art of Living 

evening lamp in his well-worn dressing gown, 
with his well-darned feet adorned by carpet-slip- 
pers of filial manufacture supported by the table 
or a chair, would be justly entitled to kindle emo- 
tions of resped: and admiration. But why, after 
all, should Rogers, ensconced in the family sit- 
ting-room with the cat on the hearth, a canary 
twittering in a cage and scattering seed in one 
corner, a sewing-machine in the other, and sur- 
rounded by all the comforts of home, consisting 
prominently of a peach-blow vase, a Japanese 
sun umbrella and engravings of George Wash- 
ington and Horace Greeley, be regarded as hap- 
pier than I in my modern drawing-room in even- 
ing dress ? What is there moral in the simplicity 
of his frayed and somewhat ugly establishment 
except the spirit of contentment and the gentle 
feelings which sandify it ? Assuming that these 
are not lacking in my home, and I believe they 
are not, I see no reason for accepting the con- 
clusion of the moralist. There is a beauty of liv- 
ing which the man with a small income is not apt 
to compass under present social conditions, the 
Declaration of Independence to the contrary not- 
withstanding. The dodrine so widely and vehe- 
mently promulgated in America that a Spartan 

[ lo] 



Income 

inelegance of life is the duty of a leading citizen, 
seems to be dying from inanition ; and the de- 
scendants of favorite sons who once triumphed 
by preaching and prad:ising it are now outvying 
those whom they were taught to stigmatize as 
the effete civilizations of Europe, in their devo- 
tion to creature comforts. 

It seems to me true that in our day and gen- 
eration the desire to live wisely here has eclipsed 
the desire to live safely hereafter. Moreover, to 
enjoy the earth and the fulness thereof, if it be 
legitimately within one's reach, has come to be 
recognized all the world over, with a special point 
of view for each nationality, as a cardinal principle 
of living wisely. We have been the last to recog- 
nize it here for the reason that a contrary theory 
of life was for several generations regarded as one 
of the bulwarks of our Constitution. Never was 
the sympathy for the poor man greater than it 
is at present. Never was there warmer interest 
in his condition. The social atmosphere is rife 
with theories and schemes for his emancipation, 
and the best brains of civilization are at work in 
his behalf. But no one wishes to be like him. 
Canting churchmen still gain some credence by 
the assertion that indigence here will prove a sav- 

[" ] 



The Art of Living 

ing grace in the world to come ; but the American 
people, quick, when it recognizes that it has been 
fooled, to discard even a once sacred conviction, 
smiles to-day at the assumption that the owner 
of a log cabin is more inherently virtuous than 
the owner of a steam-yacht. Indeed the present 
signal vice of democracy seems to be the fury to 
grow rich, in the mad struggle to accomplish 
which charader and happiness are too often sac- 
rificed. But it may be safely said that, granting 
an equal amount of virtue to Rogers and to me, 
and that each pays his bills promptly, I am a 
more enviable individual in the public eye. 

In fad: the pressing problem which confronts 
the civilized world to-day is the choice of what 
to have, for so many things have become neces- 
saries of existence which were either done with- 
out or undiscovered in the days of our grand- 
mothers, that only the really opulent can have 
everything. We sometimes hear it said that this 
or that person has too much for his own good. 
The saying is familiar, and doubtless it is true 
that luxury unappreciated and abused will cause 
degeneration ; but the complaint seems to me to 
be a Sunday-school consoler for those who have 
too little rather than a sound argument against 



In come 

great possessions. Granting that this or that per- 
son referred to had the moral fibre of Rogers or 
of me, and were altogether an unexceptionable 
character, how could he have too much for his 
own good ? Is the best any too good for any one 
of us ? 

The sad part of It Is, however, that even those 
of us who have four times, or thereabouts, the 
income of Rogers, are obliged to pick and choose 
and cannot have everything. Then Is the oppor- 
tunity for wisdom to step In and make her abode 
with us, if she only will. The perplexity, the dis- 
tress, and too often the downfall of those who 
would fain live wisely, are largely the dired: re- 
sults of foolish or unintelligent selection on their 
part. And conversely. Is not the secret of happy 
modern living, the art of knowing what to have 
when one cannot have everything there is ? 

I coupled just now. In allusion to Rogers and 
myself, virtue and punftuallty In the payment of 
bills, as though they were not altogether homo- 
geneous. I did so designedly, not because I ques- 
tion that prompt payment Is In the abstract a 
leading virtue, nor because I doubt that It has 
been absolutely Imperative for Rogers, and one 
of the secrets of his happiness ; but because I 

[ 13 ] 



The Art of Living 

am not entirely sure whether, after ten years of 
prompt payment on the first of every month on 
my part, I have not been made the sorry vi6lim 
of my own righteousness, self-righteousness I 
might say, for I have plumed myself on it when 
comparing myself with the ungodly. Although 
virtuous adion looks for no reward, the man who 
pays his bills as soon as they are presented has 
the right to exped: that he will not be obliged to 
pay anything extra for his honesty. He may not 
hope for a discount, but he does hope and be- 
lieve — at least for a time — that beefsteak paid 
for within thirty days of purchase will not be 
taxed with the delinquencies of those who pay 
tardily or not at all. Slowly but sadly I and my 
wife have come to the conclusion that the butch- 
ers, bakers, and candlestick-makers of this great 
Republic who provide for the tolerably well-to- 
do make up their losses by assessing virtue. It 
is a melancholy conclusion for one who has been 
taught to believe that punctual payment is the 
first great cardinal principle of wise living, and 
it leaves one in rather a wobbly state of mind, 
not as regards the rank of the virtue in question, 
but as regards the desirability of stridly living 
up to it in practice. I have heard stated with 

[ H] 



In come 

authority that the leading butchers, grocers, sta- 
ble-keepers, dry-goods dealers, dress-makers, 
florists, and plumbers of our great cities divide 
the customers on their books into sheep and 
goats, so to speak ; and the more prompt and 
willing a sheep, the deeper do they plunge the 
knife. Let one establish a reputation for prompt 
payment and make a purchase on the twenty-fifth 
of the month, he will receive on the first of the 
following a bill, on the twentieth, if this be not 
paid, a bill for " account rendered," on the first 
of the next month a bill for " account rendered, 
please remit," and on the tenth a visit from a col- 
lector. On the other hand I have known people 
who seem to live on the fat of the land, and to 
keep the tradesfolk in obsequious awe of them 
by force of letting their bills run indefinitely. 

Abroad, as many of us know, the status of the 
matter is very different. There interest is fig- 
ured in advance, and those who pay promptly 
get a handsome discount on the face of their bills. 
While this custom may seem to encourage debt, 
it is at least a mutual arrangement, and seems to 
have proved satisfa6tory, to judge from the fad: 
that the fashionable tailors and dress-makers of 
London and Paris are apt to demur or shrug 

C IS] 



The Art of Living 

their shoulders at immediate payment, and to be 
rather embarrassingly grateful if their accounts 
are settled by the end of a year. No one would 
wish to change the national inclination of upright 
people on this side of the water to pay on the 
spot, but the master and mistress of an establish- 
ment may well consider whether the fashionable 
tradesmen ought to oblige them to bear the entire 
penalty of being sheep instead of goats. With 
this qualification, which is set forth rather as a 
caveat than a dod:rine, the prompt payment of 
one's bills seems to be strictly co-ordinate with 
virtue, and may be properly described as the 
corner-stone of wise modern living. 

There are so many things which one has to 
have nowadays in order to be comfortable that 
it seems almost improvident toinquire howmuch 
one ought to save before facing the question of 
what one can possibly do without. Here the peo- 
ple who are said to have too much for their own 
good have an advantage over the rest of us. The 
future of their children is secure. If they dread 
death it is not because they fear to leave their 
wives and children unprovided for. Many of 
them go on saving, just the same, and talk poor 
if a railroad lowers a dividend, or there is not a 

[ i6] 



Income 

ready market for their real estate at an exalted 
profit. Are there more irritating men or women 
in the world than the over-conservative persons 
of large means who are perpetually harping on 
saving, and worrying lest they may not be able 
to put by for a rainy day, as they call it, twenty- 
five per cent, or more of their annual income ? 
The capitalist, careworn by solicitude of this sort, 
is the one fool in creation who is not entitled to 
some morsel of pity. 

How much ought the rest of us to save ? I 
know a man — now you do not know him, and 
there is no use in racking your brains to discover 
who he is, which seems to be a principal motive 
for reading books nowadays, as though we 
writers had a cabinet photograph in our mind's 
eye whenever we took a pen in hand. I know a 
man who divides his income into parts. " All 
Gaul is divided into three parts," you will re- 
member we read in the classics. Well, my friend, 
whom we will call Julius Caesar for convenience 
and mystification, divides his income, on the 
first of January, into a certain number of parts 
or portions. He and his wife have a very absorb- 
ing and earnest pow-wow over it annually. They 
take the matter very seriously, and burn the mid- 

[ 17] 



The Art of Living 

night oil in the sober endeavor to map and fig- 
ure out in advance a wise and unselfish exhibit. 
So much and no more for rent, so much for ser- 
vants, so much for household supplies, so much 
for clothes, so much for amusements, so much for 
charity, so much to meet unlooked-for contin- 
gencies, and so much for investment. By the time 
the exhibit is finished it is mathematically and 
ethically irreproachable, and, what is more, Ju- 
lius Caesar and his wife live up to it so faithfully 
that they are sure to have some eight or ten dol- 
lars to the good on the morning of December 
thirty-first, which they commonly expend in a 
pair of canvas-back ducks and a bottle of cham- 
pagne, for which they pay cash, in reward for 
their own virtue and to enable them at the stroke 
of midnight to submit to their own consciences 
a trial balance accurate to a cent. 

Now it should be stated that Mr. and Mrs. 
Julius Caesar are not very busy people in other 
respeds, and that their annual income, which is 
fifteen thousand dollars, and chiefly rent from 
improved real estate in the hands of a trustee, 
flows on as regularly and surely as a river. 
Wherefore it might perhaps be argued, if one 
were disposed to be sardonic, that this arith- 

[ >8] 



Income 

metical system of life under the circumstances 
savors of a fad, and that Julius and his wife take 
themselves and their occupation a trifle too se- 
riously, especially as they have both been known 
to inform, solemnly and augustly, more than 
one acquaintance who was struggling for a liv- 
ing, that it is every one's duty to lay up at least 
one-tenth of his income and give at least another 
tenth in charity. And yet, when one has ceased 
to smile at the antics of this pair, the conscious- 
ness remains that they are right in their practice 
of foresight and arithmetical apportioning, and 
that one who would live wisely should, if pos- 
sible, decide in advance how much he intends to 
give to the poor or put into the bank. Other- 
wise he is morally, or rather immorally, certain 
to spend everything, and to suffer disagreeable 
qualms instead of enjoying canvas-back ducks 
and a bottle of champagne on December thirty- 
first. 

As to what that much or little to be given 
and to be saved shall be, there is more room for 
discussion. Julius Caesar and his wife have de- 
clared in favor of a tenth for each, which in 
their case means fifteen hundred dollars given, 
and fifteen hundred dollars saved, which leaves 

[ 19 ] 



The Art of Living 

them a net income of twelve thousand dollars 
to spend, and they have no children. I am in- 
clined to think that if every man with ten thou- 
sand dollars a year and a family were to give 
away three hundred dollars, and prudently in- 
vest seven hundred dollars, charity would not 
suffer so long as at present, and would be no 
less kind. Unquestionably those of us who come 
out on December thirty-first just even, or eight 
or nine dollars behind instead of ahead, and 
would have been able to spend a thousand or 
two more, are the ones who find charity and sav- 
ing so difficult. Our friends who are said to have 
too much for their own good help to found a 
hospital or send a deserving youth through 
college without winking. It costs them merely 
the trouble of signing a check. But it behooves 
those who have only four instead of forty times 
as much as Rogers, if they wish to do their share 
in relieving the needs of others, to do so prompt- 
ly and systematically before the fine edge of the 
good resolutions formed on the first of January 
is dulled by the pressure of a steadily depleted 
bank account, and a steadily increasing array of 
bills. Charity, indeed, is more difficult for us to 
pradise than saving, for the simplest method of 

[20] 



Income 

saving, life insurance, is enforced by the "stand 
and deliver" argument of an annual premium. 
Only he, who before the first crocus thrusts its 
gentle head above the winter*s snow has sent his 
check to the needy, and who can conscientiously 
hang upon his office door "Fully insured; life 
insurance agents need not apply," is in a posi- 
tion to face with a calm mind the fall of the leaf 
and the December days when conscience, quick- 
ened by the dying year, inquires what we have 
done for our neighbor, and how the wife and the 
little ones would fare if we should be cut down 
in the strength of our manhood. 

And yet, too, important as saving is, there 
are so many things which we must have for the 
sake of this same wife and the little ones that 
we cannot afford to save too much. Are we to 
toil and moil all our days, go without fresh but- 
ter and never take six weeks in Europe or Japan 
because we wish to make sure that our sons and 
daughters will be amply provided for, as the 
obituary notices put it ? Some men with daugh- 
ters only have a craze of saving so that this one 
earthly life becomes a rasping, worrying ordeal, 
which is only too apt to find an end in the 
coolness of a premature grave. My friend Per- 

[21 ] 



The Art of Living 

kins — here is another chance, identity seekers, 
to wonder who Perkins really is — the father of 
four girls, is a thin, nervous lawyer, who ought 
to take a proper vacation every summer; but 
he rarely does, and the reason seems to be that 
he is saddled by the idea that to bring a girl up 
in luxury and leave her with anything less than 
five thousand dollars a year is a piece of pater- 
nal brutality. It seems to me that a father ought 
in the first place to remember that some girls 
marry. I reminded Perkins of this one day. 
"Some don't,'' he answered mournfully. "Mar- 
riage does not run in the female Perkins line. The 
chances are that two of my four will never marry. 
They might be able to get along, if they lived to- 
gether and were careful, on seven thousand dol- 
lars a year, and I must leave them that some- 
how." "Hoot toot," said I, "that seems to me 
nonsense. Don't let the spedre of decayed gen- 
tlewomen hound you into dyspepsia or Bright's 
disease, but give yourself a chance and trust to 
your girls to look out for themselves. There are 
so many things for v/omen to do now besides 
marry or pot jam, that a fond father ought to let 
his nervous system recuperate now and then." 
"I suppose you mean that they might become 

[22] 



Income 

teachers or physicians or hospital nurses or type- 
writers," said Perkins. "Declined with thanks." 
"Don't you think," I inquired with a little 
irritation, "that they would be happier so than 
in doing nothing on a fixed income, in simply 
being mildly cultivated and philanthropic on 
dividends, in moving to the sea-side in summer 
and back again in the autumn, and in dying at 
the last of some fashionable ailment?" 
"No, I don t," said Perkins. "Do you ?" 
Were I to repeat my answer to this inquiry I 
should be inviting a discussion on woman, which 
is not in place at this stage of our refledions. 
Let me say, though, that I am still of the opin- 
ion that Perkins ought to give his nervous sys- 
tem a chance and not worry so much about his 
daughters. 



[23] 



Income. 
II. 



[EEING that there are so many 
things to have and that we cannot 
have everything, what are we to 
choose ? I have sometimes, while 
trudging along in the sleighing season, noticed 
that many men, whose income I believe to be 
much smaller than mine, were able to ride be- 
hind fast trotters in fur overcoats. The reason 
upon refledion was obvious to me. Men of a 
certain class regard a diamond pin, a fur over- 
coat, and a fast horse as the first necessaries of 
existence after a bed, a hair-brush and one maid- 
of-all-work. In other words, they are willing to 
live in an inexpensive locality, with no regard 
to plumbing, society, or art, to have their food 
dropped upon the table, and to let their wives 
and daughters live with shopping as the one 
bright spot in the month's horizon, if only they, 
the husbands and fathers, can satisfy the three- 
headed ruling ambition in question. The men 
to whom I am referring have not the moral or 
aesthetic tone of Rogers and myself, and belong 
to quite a distind class of society from either of 

[^4] 



Income 

us. But among the friends of both of us there 
are people who a6t on precisely the same prin- 
ciple. A fine sense of sele6tion ought to govern 
the expenditure of income, and the wise man 
will refrain from buying a steam-yacht for him- 
self or a diamond crescent for his wife before he 
has secured a home with modern conveniences, 
an efficient staff of servants, a carefully chosen 
family physician, a summer home, or an ample 
margin wherewith to hire one, the best educa- 
tional advantages for his children which the com- 
munity will afford, and choice social surround- 
ings. In order to have these comfortably and 
completely, and still not to be within sailing dis- 
tance, so to speak, of a steam-yacht, one needs 
to have nowadays — certainly in large cities — 
an income of from seven thousand to eleven 
thousand dollars, according to where one lives. 
I make this assertion in the face of the fad: that 
our legislators all over the country annually 
decree that from four to five thousand dollars a 
year is a fat salary in reward for public service, 
and that an official with a family who is given 
twenty-five hundred or three thousand is to be 
envied. Envied by whom, pray ? By the plough- 
man, the horse-car condudor, and the corner 

[25] 



The Art of Living 

grocery man, may be, but not by the average 
business or professional man who is doing well. 
To be sure, five thousand dollars in a country 
town is affluence, if the beneficiary is content to 
stay there ; but in a city the family man with 
only that income, provided he is ambitious, can 
only just live, and might fairly be described as 
the cousin german to a mendicant. And yet there 
are some worthy citizens still, who doubtless 
would be aghast at these statements, and would 
wish to know how one is to spend ^y^ thousand 
dollars a year without extravagance. We certainly 
did start in this country on a very different ba- 
sis, and the do6lrine of plain living was written 
between the lines of the Constitution. We were 
practically to do our own work, to be content 
with pie and doughnuts as the staple articles of 
nutrition, to abide in one locality all the year 
round, and to eschew color, ornament, and refined 
recreation. All this as an improvement over the 
civilization of Europe and a rebuke to it. What- 
ever the ethical value of this theory of existence 
in moulding the national charader may have 
been, it has lost its hold to-day, and we as a 
nation have fallen into line with the once sneered- 
at older civilizations, though we honestly believe 

[.6] 



Income 

that we are giving and going to give a peculiar 
redeeming brand to the adopted, venerable cus- 
toms which will purge them of dross and bale. 
Take the servant question, for instance. We 
are perpetually discussing how we are to do away 
with the social reproach which keeps native 
American women out of domestic service ; yet 
at the same time in adual pradtice the demand 
for servants grows more and more urgent and 
wide-spread, and they are consigned still more 
hopelessly, though kindly, to the kitchen and 
servants' hall in imitation of English upper-class 
life. In the days when our Emerson sought to 
practise the social equality for which he yearned, 
by requiring his maids to sit at his own dinner- 
table, a domestic establishment was a modest af- 
fair of a cook and a second girl. Now, the people 
who are said to have too much for their own 
good, keep butlers, ladies' maids, governesses, 
who like Mahomet's coffin hover between the 
parlor and the kitchen, superfine laundresses, 
pages in buttons, and other housekeeping ac- 
cessories, and domestic life grows bravely more 
and more complex. To be sure, too, I am quite 
aware that, as society is at present constituted, 
only a comparatively small number out of our 

[^7] 



T*he Art of J^iving 

millions of free-born American citizens have or 
are able to earn the seven to eleven thousand dol- 
lars a year requisite for thorough comfort, and 
that the most interesting and serious problem 
which confronts human society to-day is the an- 
nihilation or lessening of the terrible existing in- 
equalities in estate and welfare. 

This problem, absorbing as it is, can scarcely 
be solved in our time. But, whatever the solu- 
tion, whether by socialism, government control, 
or brotherly love, is it not safe to assume that 
when every one shares alike, society is not going 
to be satisfied with humble, paltry, or ugly con- 
ditions as the universal weal ? If the new dispen- 
sation does not provide a style and manner of 
living at least equal in comfort, luxury, and re- 
finement to that which exists among the well- 
to-do to-day, it will be a failure. Humanity will 
never consent to be shut off from the best in 
order to be exempt from the worst. The millen- 
nium must supply not merely bread and butter, a 
house, a pig, a cow, and a sewing-machine for 
every one, but attractive homes, gardens, and 
galleries, literature and music, and all the range 
of aesthetic social adjunds which tend to pro- 
mote healthy bodies, delightful manners, fine 

[28] 



Income 

sensibilities, and noble purposes, or it will be no 
millennium. 

Therefore one who would live wisely and has 
the present means, though he may deplore exist- 
ing misery and seek to relieve it, does not give 
away to others all his substance but spends it 
chiefly on himself and his family until he has sat- 
isfied certain needs. By way of a house he feels 
that he requires not merely a frail, unornamental 
shelter, but a carefully constructed, well venti- 
lated, cosily and artistically furnished dwelling, 
where his family will neither be scrimped for 
space nor exposed to discomforts, and where he 
can entertain his friends tastefully if not with ele- 
gance. All this costs money and involves large 
and recurrent outlays for heating, lighting, up- 
holstery, sanitary appliances, silver, china, and 
glass. It is not sufficient for him that his chil- 
dren should be sure of their own father ; he is 
solicitous, besides, that they should grow up as 
free as possible from physical blemishes, and 
mentally and spiritually sound and attractive. 
To promote this he must needs consult or en- 
gage from time to time skilled specialists, den- 
tists, oculists, dancing and drawing masters, pri^ 
vate tutors, and music-teachers. To enable these 

[^9] 



The Art of Living 

same sons and daughters to make the most of 
themselves, he must, during their early man- 
hood and womanhood, enable them to pursue 
professional or other studies, to travel, and to 
mingle in cultivated and well-bred society. He 
must live in a choice neighborhood that he may 
surround himself and his family with refining 
influences, and accordingly he must pay from 
twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred or three 
thousand dollars a year for rent, according to the 
size and desirability of the premises. Unless he 
would have his wife and daughters merely house- 
hold fadors and drudges, he must keep from 
three to ^y^ or six servants, whose wages vary 
from four to six or seven dollars a week, and 
feed them. 

Nor can the athletic, aesthetic, or merely plea- 
surable needs of a growing or adolescent house- 
hold be ignored. He must meet the steady and 
relentless drain from each of these sources, or be 
conscious that his flesh and blood have not the 
same advantages and opportunities which are en- 
joyed by their contemporaries. He must own a 
pew, a library share, a fancy dress costume, and 
a cemetery lot, and he must always have loose 
change on hand for the hotel waiter and the col- 

[30] 



Income 

ored railway porter. The family man in a large 
city who meets these several demands to his 
entire satisfa6tion will have little often thousand 
dollars left for the purchase of a trotter, a fur 
overcoat, and a diamond pin. 

The growing consciousness of the value of 
these complex demands of our modern civiliza- 
tion, when intelligently gratified, adls at the pre- 
sent day as a cogent incentive to make money, not 
for the mere sake of accumulation, but to spend. 
Gross accumulation with scant expenditure has 
always been san6lioned here ; but to grow rich 
and yet be lavish has only within a compara- 
tively recent period among us seemed reconcil- 
able with religious or national principles. Even 
yet he who many times a millionaire still walks 
unkempt, or merely plain and honest, has not en- 
tirely lost the halo of hero worship. But, though 
the old man is permitted to do as he prefers, bet- 
ter things are demanded of his sons and daugh- 
ters. Nor can the argument that some of the 
greatest men in our history have been nurtured 
and brought up in cabins and away from refin- 
ing influences be soundly used against the ad- 
visability of making the most of income, even 
though we now and then ask ourselves whether 

[31 ] 



The Art of Living 

modern living is producing statesmen of equally 
firm mould. But we thrill no longer at mention 
of a log cabin or rail splitting, and the very name 
of hard cider suggests rather unpleasantly the 
corner grocery store and the pie-permeated, hair- 
cloth suited New England parlor. 

Merely because other nations have long been 
aware that it was wise and not immoral to try 
to live comfortably and beautifully our change 
of faith is no less absorbing to us. We confi- 
dently expedt to win fresh laurels by our origi- 
nality, intelligence, and unselfishness in this new 
old field. Already have we made such strides 
that our establishments on this side of the water 
make up in genuine comfort what they lack in 
ancient manorial pidluresqueness and ghost- 
haunted grace. Each one of us who is in earnest 
is asking how he is to make the most of what he 
has or earns, so as to attain that charm of refined 
living which is civilization's best flower — living 
which if merely material and unanimated by in- 
telligence and noble aims is without charm, but 
which is made vastly more difficult of realization 
in case we are without means or refuse to spend 
them adequately. 

[32] 



The Dwelling. 
I. 

^pR. and Mrs. Julius Caesar, who, 

M,5^. as you may remember, divide 
X their income into parts with 
^P mathematical precision, were not 
^p^p^p as well off in this world's goods 
at the time of their marriage as they are now. 
Neither Mr. Caesar's father nor Mrs. Caesar's 
grandmother was then dead, and consequently 
the newly wedded pair, though set up by their 
resped:ive families with a comfortable income, 
felt that it was incumbent upon them to pra6lise 
strid: economy. Then it was that Julius con- 
ceived what seemed to them both the happy 
idea of buying a house dirt cheap in a neigh- 
borhood which was not yet improved, and im- 
proving the neighborhood, instead of paying an 
exorbitant price for a residence in a street which 
was already all it should be. 

"Why," saidjulius," should n't we buy oneof 
those new houses in Sunset Terrace ? They look 
very attractive, and if we can only induce two or 
three congenial couples to join forces with us we 
shall have the nucleus of a delightful colony." 



The Art of Living 

"Besides, everything will be nice and new," 
said Mrs. Julius, or Dolly Caesar, as her friends 
know her. " No cockroaches, no mice, no moths, 
no family skeletons to torment us. Julius, you are 
a genius. We can just as well set the fashion as 
follow meekly in fashion's wake." 

So said, so done. Julius Caesar bent his intelled 
upon the matter and soon found three congenial 
couples who were willing to join forces with him. 
Before another twelve months had passed, four 
baby-wagons — one of them double-seated — 
were to be seen on four sunny grass-plots in 
front of four attractive, artistic-looking villas on 
Sunset Terrace. Where lately sterility, mortar, 
and weeds had held carnival, there was now an 
air of tasteful gentility. Thanks to the example 
of Dolly Caesar, who had an eye and an instind: 
for such matters, the four brass door-plates 
shone like the sun, the paint was spick and 
span, the four gravel paths were in apple-pie 
order, the four grass-plots were emerald from 
timely use of a revolving lawn sprinkler, and 
the four nurse-maids, who watched like dragons 
over the four baby-wagons, were neat-looking 
and comely. No wonder that by the end of the 
second year there was not a vacant house in 

[34] 



The Dwelling 

the street, and that everybody who wished to 
hve in a fashionable locality was eager for a 
chance to enter Sunset Terrace. No wonder, too, 
that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Caesar were able, by 
the end of the fourth year, to emerge from Sun- 
set Terrace with a profit on the sale of their 
villa which made it rent free for the entire pe- 
riod, and left them with a neat little surplus to 
boot, and to settle down with calm minds on 
really fashionable Belport Avenue, in the stately 
mansion devised to them by Mrs. Caesar's grand- 
mother. 

Now, it must be borne in mind that a Mr. 
and Mrs. Julius Caesar can sometimes do that 
which a Mr. and Mrs. George J. Spriggs find 
difficulty in accomplishing. Spriggs, at the time 
of his marriage to Miss Florence Green, the 
daughter of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General 
Homer W. Green, conceived the happy idea of 
setting up his household gods in Locust Road, 
which lies about as far from Belport Avenue in 
one direction as Sunset Terrace in the other. 
Both are semi-suburban. It also occurred to him 
at the outset to join forces with three or four 
congenial couples, but at the last moment the 
engagement of one of the couples in question 



The Art of Living 

was broken, and the other three decided to live 
somewhere else. To have changed his mind then 
would have involved the sacrifice of one hun- 
dred dollars paid to bind the bargain to the land- 
owner. So it seemed best to them on the whole 
to move in, as they had to live somewhere. 

"It *s just a little bit dreary, is n't it?" said 
Florence Spriggs, pathetically, as she looked out 
of her bow window at the newly finished street 
which was not finished, and at the grass-plot 
where there was no grass. " But I sha'n't be a 
bit lonely with you, George.'* 

"I wonder if the color of this house has been 
changed," said Spriggs, presently, as he glanced 
up at the facade and from that to the other houses 
in the block, each of which was vacant. He and 
Florence had gone out after dinner to take a 
stroll and survey the neighborhood which they 
hoped to improve. 

"Of course it hasn't! How could it be?" 
said Florence. 

"Somehow it looks a more staring shade of 
yellow than it did the first time we saw it. And 
I don't fancy altogether the filigree work on the 
door, or that Egyptian renaissance scroll set into 
the eastern wall, do you, dearest? However, 

[36] 



The Dwelling 

we 're in now and can't get out, for the title has 
passed. I wonder who will buy the other 
houses ?" 

They were soon to know. They were alone 
all winter, but in the early spring a family moved 
in on either side of them. The houses in Locust 
Road, like those in Sunset Terrace, were of the 
villa order, with grass-plots, which were almost 
lawns, appurtenant. Though less pleasing than 
those which had taken the more discerning eye 
of Mrs. Julius Caesar, they were nevertheless 
comparatively inoffensive and sufficiently taste- 
ful. Neighbor number one proved to be of an 
enterprising and imaginative turn. He changed 
the color of his villa from staring yellow to star- 
thng crushed strawberry, supplemented his Egyp- 
tian renaissance scroll and filigree with inlaid 
jewel and frost work, stationed a cast-iron stag 
in one corner of the grass-plot and a cast-iron 
Diana with a bow in another, and then rested on 
his laurels. Neighbor number two was shiftless 
and untidy. His grass-plot did not thrive, and 
the autumn leaves choked his gravel path. His 
windows were never washed, his blinds hung 
askew, and his one maid-of-all-work preferred 
the lawn to the laundry as a drying-room. His 

[37] 



The Art of Living 

wife sunned herself in a wrapper, and he himself 
in his shirt sleeves. A big mongrel dog drooled 
perpetually on the piazza or tracked it with his 
muddy feet, and even the baby-wagon wore the | 
appearance of dilapidation and halted because of 
a broken spring. 

The Spriggses tried to be lenient and even 
genial with both these neighbors, but somehow 
the attempt was not successful. Neighbor num- 
ber one became huffy because Spriggs took no 
notice of his advice that he embellish his grass- 
plot with a stone mastiff or an umbrella and 
cherub fountain, and neighbor number two took 
offence because Spriggs complained that the ven- 
tilator on his chimney kept Mrs. Spriggs awake 
by squeaking. Mrs. Spriggs did her best to set 
them both a good example by having everything 
as tasteful on the one hand and as tidy on the 
other as it should be. In the hope of improving 
them she even dropped suggestive hints as to 
how people ought to live, but the hints were not 
taken. What was worse none of the other houses 
were taken. As Spriggs pathetically expressed it, 
the iron stag on the one side and the weekly 
wash on the other kept purchasers at bay. He 
tried to buoy himself up by believing that a glut 

[38] 



The Dwelling 

in the real estate market was the cause why the 
remaining villas in Locust Road hung fire, but 
this consolation was taken away from him the 
following spring when an adive buying move- 
ment all along the line still left them without 
other neighbors. The unoccupied villas had be- 
gun to wear an air of dilapidation, in spite of 
their Egyptian renaissance scrolls and the pre- 
sence of a cast-iron Diana. 

To crown the situation the baby of neighbor 
number two caught diphtheria from being left in 
its halting wagon by the maid-of-all-work too 
near the cesspool on the lawn, and was kissed 
by the Spriggs baby before the fad: was disco- 
vered. If there is one thing more irritating to the 
maternal mind than another, it is to have dear 
baby catch something from the child of people 
whom you reprobate. One feels that the original 
horrors of the disease are sure to be enhanced 
through such a medium. When the only child 
of the Julius Caesars died of the same disease, 
contracted from a germ inhaled on Belport Ave- 
nue, the parents felt that only destiny was to 
blame. On the other hand, though the Spriggs 
baby recovered, Mrs. Spriggs never quite forgave 
herself for what had happened. Before the next 



The Art of Living 

autumn Spriggs parted with his estate on Lo- 
cust Road for so much less than he had paid for 
it that he felt obliged to accept the hospitality 
of his wife's father, ex-Assistant Postmaster- 
General Green, during the succeeding winter. 

The moral of this double-jointed tale is two- 
fold; firstly that the young householder cannot 
always count upon improving the neighborhood 
in which he sets up his goods and chattels after 
marriage, and secondly, that, in case the neigh- 
borhood fails to improve, a tenancy for a year 
or two is a less serious burden than absolute 
ownership. It is extremely pleasant, to be sure, 
to be able to declare that one has paid for one's 
house, and I am aware that the consciousness 
of unencumbered ownership in the roof over 
one's head affords one of the most affeding and 
effedlive opportunities for oratory which the free- 
born citizen can desire. The hand of many a hus- 
band and father has been stayed from the wine- 
cup or the gaming-table by the pathetic thought 
that he owned his house. As a rule, too, it is 
cheaper to pay the interest on a mortgage than 
to pay rent, and if one is perfedlly sure of being 
able to improve the neighborhood, or at least save 
it from degeneration, it certainly seems desirable 

[40] 



The Dwelling 

to be the landlord of one's house, even though it 
be mortgaged so cleverly that the equity of re- 
demption is merely a name. But in this age of 
.semi-suburban development, when Roads and 
Terraces and Parks and Gates and other Anglo- 
European substitutes for streets serve as "springes 
to catch woodcocks," a young couple on real 
estate ownership bent should have the discerning 
eye of a Mrs. Julius Caesar in order not to fall 
a prey to the specious land and lot speculator. 
If you happen to hit on a Sunset Terrace, ev- 
erything is rose color, but to find one's self an 
owner in fee on a Locust Road, next door to 
crushed strawberry and a cast-iron stag, will pal- 
sy the hopes of the hopeful. 

What attradive, roomy, tasteful affairs many 
of these semi-suburban villas, which are built 
nowadays on the new Roads, Terraces, Parks, 
Gates, and even Streets, are to be sure. There 
are plenty of homely ones too, but it is a simple 
matter to avoid the Egyptian renaissance scroll, 
and the inlaid jewel work and stained-glass bull's 
eyes if one only will. They seem to be affording 
to many a happy solution of the ever new and 
ever old problem, which presents itself to every 
man who is about to take a wife, whether it is 

[41 ] 



The Art of Living 

preferable to live in the city or the country. 
These new suburbs, or rather outlying wards of 
our large cities, which have been carved out of 
what, not many years ago, was real country where 
cows browsed and woods flourished, must be very 
alluring to people who would fain live out of 
town and still be in it. When, by stepping on 
an eledric car or taking the train, you can, within 
a quarter of an hour, be on your own piazza in- 
haling fresh air and privileged to feast your eyes 
on a half acre or less of greensward belonging to 
yourself, there would seem to be strong induce- 
ments for refusing to settle down in a stuffy, 
smoky, dusty, wire-pestered city street, however 
fashionable. Rapid transit has made or is mak- 
ing the environs of our cities so accessible that 
the time-honored problem presents itself under 
different conditions than formerly. There is no 
such thing now as the real country for anybody 
who is not prepared to spend an hour in the train. 
Even then one is liable to encounter asphalt walks 
and a Soldier's monument in the course of a syl- 
van stroll. But the intervening territory is ample 
and alluring. 

For one-half the rent demanded for a town 
house of meagre dimensions in the middle of a 

[42] 



The Dwelling 

block, with no outlook whatever, new, spacious, 
airy, ornamental homes with a plot of land and a 
pleasing view attached, are to be had for the seek- 
' ing within easy living distance from nearly every 
large city. When I begin to rhapsodize, as I 
sometimes do, I am apt to ask myself why it is 
that anybody continues to live in town. It was 
only the other day that I happened, while driving 
with my wife in the suburbs, to call her attention, 
enthusiastically, to the new house which Perkins 
has secured for himself. You may remember that 
Perkins is the thin, nervous lawyer with four 
daughters, who is solicitous as to what will be- 
come of them when he is dead. We drove by 
just as he came up the avenue from the station, 
which is only a three minutes' walk from the 
house. He looked tired — he always does — but 
there was already a fresh jauntiness in his tread 
as though he sniffed ozone. He looked up at the 
new house complacently, as well he might, for it 
is large enough even for four daughters, and has 
all the engaging impressiveness of a not too 
quaintly proportioned and not too abnormally 
stained modern villa, a highly evolved composite 
of an old colonial mansion, a Queen Anne cot- 
tage, and a French chateau. Before he reached 

[43 ] 



The Art of Living 

the front door, two of his daughters ran out to 
embrace him and reHeve him of his bag and bun- 
dles, and a half-hour later, as we drove back, he 
was playing lawn tennis with three of his girls, 
in a white blazer with pink stripes and knicker- 
bockers, which gave his thin and eminently re- 
spectable figure a rather rakish air. 

" Barbara," I said to my wife," why is n't Per- 
kins doing the sensible thing ? That *s a charming 
house, double the size he could get for the same 
money in town — and the rent is eight hundred 
or a thousand dollars instead of fifteen hundred 
or two thousand. He needs fewer servants out 
here, for the parlor-maid is n't kept on tenter- 
hooks to answer the door-bell, and there is fresh 
air to come back to at night, and the means for 
outdoor exercise on his own or his neighbor's 
lawn, which for a nervous, thin-chested, seden- 
tary man like Perkins is better than cod-liver 
oil. Think what robust specimens those daugh- 
ters should be with such opportunities for tennis, 
golf, skating, and bicycling. 

On Sundays and holidays, if the spirit moves 
him and his wife and the girls to start off on an 
exploring expedition, they are not obliged to take 
a train or pound over dusty pavements before 

[44] 



T'he Dwelling 

they begin ; the wild flowers and autumn foliage 
and chestnut-burs are all to be had in the woods 
and glens within a mile or two of their own home. 
Or if he needs to be undisturbed, no noise, no 
interruption, but nine hours' sleep and an atmo- 
sphere suited to rest and contemplation on his 
piazza or by his cheerful, tasteful fireside. Why 
is n't this preferable to the artificial, restless life 
of the city ? " 

" And yet," said Barbara, " I have heard you 
state that only a rich man can afford to live in 
the country." 

Women certainly delight to store up remarks 
made in quite another connexion, and use them 
as random arguments against us. 

" My dear Barbara," said I, " this is not the 
country. Of course in the real country, one needs 
so many things to be comfortable nowadays — a 
large house, stables, horses, and what not — it has 
always seemed to me that a poor man with social 
or cultivated instindls had better stay in town. 
But have not Perkins and these other semi-sub- 
urbanites hit the happy medium ? They have 
railroads or eledric cars at their doors, and yet 
they can get real barn-yard smells." 

" I doubt if they can," said Barbara. " That is, 

[45] 



The Art of Living 

unless they start a barn-yard for the purpose, and 
that would bring the health authorities down up- 
on them at once. If this were the country, I could 
entirely thrill at the description you have just 
given of your friend Mr. Perkins. The real coun- 
try is divine ; but this is oleomargarine country. 
On the other hand, however, I quite agree with 
you that if Mr. Perkins is delicate, this is a far 
healthier place for him than the city, in spite of 
the journey in the train twice a day. The houses 
— his house in particular — are lovely, and I dare 
say we all ought to do the same. He can certainly 
come in conta6l with nature — such nature as 
there is left within walking distance — easier than 
city people. But to console me for not having one 
of these new, roomy villas, and to prevent you 
from doing anything rash, I may as well state a 
few objections to your paradise. As to expense, 
of course there is a saving in rent, and it is true 
that the parlor-maid does not have to answer the 
door-bell so often, and accordingly can do other 
things instead. Consequently, too, Mrs. Perkins 
and the four girls may get into the habit of going 
about untidy and in their old clothes. A dowdy 
girl with rosy cheeks and a fine constitution is a 
pitiable objedl in this age of feminine progress. 

[46] 



The Dwelling 

Mr. Perkins will have to look out for this, and 
he may require cod-liver oil after all. 

' " Then there is the question of schools. In 
many of these semi-suburban paradises there are 
no desirable schools, especially for girls, which 
necessitates perpetual coming and going on trains 
and cars, and will make education a wearisome 
thing, especially for Mrs. Perkins. She will find, 
too, that her servants are not so partial to wild 
flowers and chestnut-burs and fresh air as her 
husband and daughters. Only the inexperienced 
will apply, and they will come to her relu6tantly, 
and as soon as she has accustomed them to her 
ways and made them skilful, they will tell her 
they are not happy, and need the society of their 
friends in town. 

" Those are a few of the drawbacks to the 
semi-suburban villa ; but the crucial and most se- 
rious obje6tion is, that unless one is very watch- 
ful, and often in spite of watchfulness, the semi- 
suburbanite shuts himself off from the best social 
interests and advantages. He begins by imagin- 
ing that there will be no difference ; that he will 
see just as much of his friends and go just as fre- 
quently to balls and dinner-parties, the concert 
and the theatre, the educational or philanthropic 

[47] 



The Art of Living 

meeting. But just that requisite and impending 
twenty minutes in the train or eledric car at the 
fag end of the day is liable to make a hermit of 
him to all intents'and purposes by the end of the 
second year.Of course, if one is rich and has one's 
own carriage, the process of growing rusty is more 
gradual, though none the less sure. On that very 
account most people with a large income come to 
town for a few months in winter at any rate. There 
are so many things in life to do, that even friends 
with the best and most loving intentions call once 
on those who retire to suburban villas and let 
that do for all time. To be sure, some people 
revel in being hermits and think social enter- 
tainments and excitements a mere waste of time 
and energy. I am merely suggesting that for 
those who wish to keep in close touch with the 
adtive human interests of the day, the semi-sub- 
urban villa is somewhat of a snare. The Perkinses 
will have to exercise eternal vigilance, or they will 
find themselves seven evenings out of seven nod- 
ding by their fire-side after an ample meal, with 
all their social instincts relaxed." 

Undeniably Barbara offered the best solution 
of this question in her remark, that those who 
can afford it spend the spring and autumn in the 

[48] 



The Dwelling 

country and come to town for the winter months. 
Certainly, if I were one of the persons who are 
said to have too much for their own good, I 
should do something of the kind. I might not 
buy a suburban villa; indeed, I would rather go 
to the real country, where there are lowing kine, 
and rich cream and genuine barnyard smells, in- 
stead of eledlric cars and soldiers' monuments. 
There would I remain until it was time to kill 
the Thanksgiving turkey, and then I would hie 
me to town in order to refresh my mental fac- 
ulties with city sights and sounds during the 
winter-spring solstice, when the lowing kine are 
all in the barn, and even one who owns a sub- 
urban villa has to fight his way from his front 
door through snow-drifts, and listen to the whis- 
tling wind instead of the robin red-breast or 
tinkling brook. 

Patterson, the banker, is surely to be envied 
in his enjoyment of two establishments, notwith- 
standing that the double ownership suggests 
again the effete civilizations of Europe, and was 
once considered undemocratic. Patterson, though 
his son has been through the Keeley cure, and 
his daughter lives apart from her husband, has 
a charming place thirty-five miles from town, 

[49] 



The Art of Living 

where he has many acres and many horses, cows, 
and sheep, an expanse of woods, a running stream, 
delicious vegetables and fruit; golf links, and a 
fine country house with all the modern improve- 
ments, including a cosy, spacious library. Then 
he has another house — almost a palace — in 
town which he opens in the late autumn and oc- 
cupies until the middle of May, for Patterson, in 
spite of some foibles, is no tax dodger. 

Yes, to have two houses and live half of the 
year in town and the other half in the country, 
with six to eight weeks at the seaside or moun- 
tains, so as to give the children salt air and bath- 
ing, or a thorough change, is what most of us 
would choose in case we were blessed with too 
much for our own good. But, unfortunately or 
fortunately, most of us with even comfortable 
incomes cannot have two houses, and conse- 
quently must choose between town and country 
or semi-country, especially as the six or eight 
weeks at the sea-side or mountains is apt to seem 
imperative when midsummer comes. According, 
therefore, as we seled: to live in one or the other, 
it behooves us to pra6tise eternal vigilance, so 
that we may not lose our love of nature and 
wreck our nerves in the worldly bustle of city 

[so] 



The Dwelling 

life, or become inert, rusty, and narrow among 
the lowing kine or in semi-suburban seclusion. 
In order to live wisely, we who dwell in the 
cities should in our spare hours seek fresh air, 
sunlight, and intercourse with nature, and we 
whose homes are out of town should in our turn 
rehabilitate our social instinds and rub up our 
manners. 

Regarding the real country, there is one other 
consideration of which I am constantly reminded 
by a little water-color hanging in my library, 
painted by me a few years ago while I was stay- 
ing with my friend Henley. It represents a 
modest but pretty house and a charming rustic 
landscape. I call it Henley's Folly. Henley, who 
possessed ardent social instin6ls,had always lived 
in town; but he suddenly took it into his head 
to move thirty miles into the country. He told 
me that he did so primarily for the benefit of 
his wife and children, but added that it would 
be the best thing in the world for him, that it 
would domesticate him still more completely, 
and give him time to read and cultivate himself. 
When I went to stay with him six months later, 
he was jubilant regarding the delights of the 
country, and declared that he had become a 

[51 ] 



The Art of Living 

genuine farmer. He pished at the suggestion 
that the daily journey to and from town was ex- 
hausting, and informed me that his one idea was 
to get away from the bricks and mortar as early 
in the afternoon as possible. Just two years later 
I heard with surprise, one day, that the Henleys 
had sold their farm and were coming back to 
town. The reason — confided to me by one of the 
family — was that his wife was so much alone that 
she could not endure the solitude any longer. 
"You see," said my informant, "the nearest 
house of their friends was four miles off, and as 
Henley stayed in town until the last gun fired, the 
days he returned home at all, and as he had or in- 
vented a reason for staying in town all night at 
least once a week, poor Mrs. Henley realized 
that the lot of a farmer^s wife was not all roses 
and sunshine." From this I opine that if one 
with ardent social instindls would live wisely he 
should not become a gentleman farmer merely 
for the sake of his wife and children. 



[sO 



The Dwelling. 
II. 



SjH ETHER we live in the city or the 

W"^ "^*" rfM.* country, it must be apparent to all of 
"m' m ^m ^^ ^^^ ^ great wave of architectural 
^^53?!^ adtivity in respedl to dwelling-houses 
has been spreading over our land during the past 
twenty years. The American architedl has been 
getting in his work and showing what he could 
do, with the result that the long, monotonous row 
of brick or freestone custom-made city houses, 
and the stereotyped white country farm-house 
with green blinds and an ell or lean-to attached, 
have given place to a vivid and heterogeneous 
display of individual effort. Much of this is fine 
and some deadly, for the display includes not 
merely the generally tasteful and artistic con- 
ceptions of our trained native architects, who 
have studied in Paris, but the raw notions of 
all the builders of custom-made houses who, 
recognizing the public desire for striking and 
original effedts, are bent upon surpassing one 
another. 

Therefore, while we have many examples, both 
urban and suburban, of beautiful and impressive 

[53] 



The Art of Living 

house architedlure, the new sedtions of our cities 
and suburbs fairly bristle with a multiplicity of 
individual experiments in which the salient fea- 
tures of every known type of architecture are 
blended fearlessly together. The native archi- 
ted: who has neither been to Paris nor been able 
to devote much time to study has not been lim- 
ited in the expression of his genius by artistic 
codes or conventions. Consequently he has felt 
no hesitation in using extinguisher towers, medi- 
aeval walls, battlement effeds. Queen Anne cot- 
tage lines. Old Colonial proportions, and Eastern 
imagery in the same design, and any one of them 
at any critical jundture when his work has seemed 
to him not sufficiently striking for his own or the 
owner's taste. 

Satisfad:ory as all this is as evidence of a pro- 
gressive spirit, and admitting that many of even 
these lawless manifestations of talent are not with- 
out merit, it is nevertheless aggressively true that 
the smug complacency of the proprietor of the 
suburban villa, which is hedged about by a stone 
rampart of variegated rough stone on an ordi- 
nary building lot, has no justification whatever. 
Nor has the master of the castellated, gloomy, 
half-Moorish, half-mediaeval mansion, which dis- 

[54] 



T'he Dwelling 

figures the fashionable quarter of many of our 
cities, occasion to congratulate himself on having 
paid for a thing of beauty. The number of our 
well-trained architects, though constantly increas- 
ing, is still small, especially as compared with the 
number of people of means who are eager to 
occupy a thing of beauty ; then, too, even the 
trained architect is apt to try experiments for the 
sake of testing his genius, on a dog, so to speak — 
some confiding plutocrat with a love of splendor 
who has left everything to him. 

The result is that grotesque and eye-distress- 
ing monsters of masonry stand side by side on 
many of our chief avenues with the most grace- 
ful and finished specimens of native architectural 
inspiration. As there is no law which prevents 
one from building or buying an ugly house, and 
as the architect, whose experiment on a dog tor- 
tures the public eye, suffers no penalty for his 
crime, our national house architecture may be 
said to be working out its own salvation at the 
public expense. It is the duty of a patriotic citi- 
zen to believe that in this, as in other matters of 
national welfare, the beautiful gradually will pre- 
vail ; and assuredly the many very attractive pri- 
vate residences which one sees both in the city 

[55] 



The Art of Living 

and the country should tend to make us hopeful. 
Why is it that the rich man who would live 
wisely feels the necessity for so large a house in 
the city ? Almost the first thing that one who has 
accumulated or inherited great possessions does 
nowadays is to leave the house where very likely 
he has been comfortable and move into a mam- 
moth establishment suggesting rather a palace or 
an emporium than a house. Why is this ? Some 
one answers that it is for the sake of abundant 
light and extra space. Surely in a handsome house 
of twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be 
light and space enough for the average family, 
however fastidious or exading. In the country, 
where one needs many spare rooms for the ac- 
commodation of guests, there are some advan- 
tages in the possession of an abnormally large 
house. But how is the comfort of the city man 
enhanced by one, that is, if the attendant dis- 
comforts are weighed in the same scale ? It has 
sometimes seemed to me that the wealthy or suc- 
cessful man invests in a prodigious mansion as 
a sort of testimonial ; as though he felt it incum- 
bent on him to ered a conventional monument 
to his own grandeur or success, in order to let 
the public entertain no doubt about it. But so 

[56] 



The Dwelling 

many otherwise sensible men have deliberately 
built huge city houses that this can scarcely be 
the controlling motive in all cases. Perhaps, if 
asked, they would throw the responsibility on 
their wives. But it is even more difficult to un- 
derstand why a sensible woman should wish one 
of the vast houses which our rising architeds are 
naturally eager to receive orders to constru6t. A 
handsome house where she can entertain attrac- 
tively, yes : an exquisitely furnished, sunny, cor- 
ner house by all means ; a house where each child 
may have a room apart and where there are plenty 
of spare rooms, if you like ; but why a mammoth 
cave ? She is the person who will suffer the dis- 
comforts to be weighed in the same scale, for the 
care will fall on her. 

We have in this country neither trained ser- 
vants nor the housekeeper system. The wife and 
mother who is the mistress of a huge establish- 
ment wishes it to be no less a home than her 
former residence, and her husband would be the 
first to demur were she to cast upon others the 
burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate- 
sized modern house is the cause of care enough, 
as we all know, and wherefore should any wo- 
man seek to multiply her domestic worries by 

[57] 



The Art of Living 

duplicating or trebling the number of her ser- 
vants? To become the manager of a hotel or to 
cater for an ocean steamship is perhaps a tempt- 
ing ambition for one in search of fortune, but 
why should a woman, who can choose what she 
will have, eledt to be the slave of a modern pal- 
ace with extinguisher towers ? Merely to be able 
to invite all her social acquaintance to her house 
once a year without crowding them ? It would 
be simpler to hire one of the many halls now 
adapted for the purpose. 

The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, 
and the worries consequent upon their ineffi- 
ciency, is probably the chief cause of the rapid 
growth of the apartment-house among us. The 
contemporary archited has seleded this class of 
building for some of his deadliest conceits. Great 
piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron 
tower up stories upon stories high, and frown 
upon us at the street-corners like so many Brob- 
dingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nev- 
ertheless they contain the homes of many citi- 
zens, and the continuous appearance of new and 
larger specimens attests their increasing popu- 
larity. Twenty years ago there was scarcely an 
apartment-house to be seen in our cities. There 

[58] 



The Dwelling 



was a certain number of hotels where families 
could and did live all the year round, but the 
ten-story monster, with a janitor, an elevator, 
steam heat, eledlric light, and all the alleged com- 
forts of home, was pradically unknown. We 
have always professed to be such a home-loving 
people, and the so-called domestic hearth has 
always been such a touchstone of sentiment 
among us that the exchange of the family roof 
for the community of a flat by so many well-to- 
do persons certainly seems to suggest either that 
living cheek by jowl with a number of other 
households is not so distasteful as it seems to 
the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeep- 
ing is so irksome that women are tempted to 
swallow sentiment and escape from their tram- 
mels to the comparatively easy conditions of an 
apartment. It does seem as though one's iden- 
tity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming 
a tenant in common, and as though the family 
circle could never be quite the same thing to 
one who was conscious that his was only a part 
of one tremendous whole. And yet, more and 
more people seem to be anxious to share a jani- 
tor and front door, and, though the more fas- 
tidious insist on their own cuisine, there are not 

[59] 



The Art of Living 

a few content to entrust even their gastronomic 
welfare to a kitchen in common. 

It must be admitted, even by those of us who 
rejoice in our homes, that there is much to be said 
in favor of the apartment-house as a solver of 
pra6tical difficulties, and that our imaginations 
are largely responsible for our antipathy. When 
once inside a private apartment of the most de- 
sirable and highly evolved kind one cannot but 
admit that there is no real lack of privacy, and 
that the assertion that the owner has no domes- 
tic hearth is in the main incorred:. To be sure 
the domain belonging to each suite is compara- 
tively circumscribed; there is no opportunity for 
roaming from garret to cellar; no private laun- 
dry; no private backyard; and no private front- 
door steps; but to all pradlical intents one is no 
less free from intrusion or inspedion than in a 
private house, and it may also be said that re- 
porters and other persevering visitors are kept 
at a more respedlful distance by virtue of the 
janitor in common on the ground floor. The 
sentiment in favor of limited individual posses- 
sion is difficult to eradicate from sensitive souls, 
and rightly, perhaps, many of us refuse to be 
convinced; but it remains true that the woman 

[60] 



The Dwelling 

who has become the mistress of a commodious 
and well-managed apartment must have many- 
agreeable quarters of an hour in congratulating 
herself that perplexities concerning chores, heat- 
ing, lighting, flights of stairs, leaks, and a host 
of minor domestic matters no longer threaten 
her peace of mind, and — greatest boon of all 
— that she now can manage with two or three 
servants instead of ^nq, or six. 

In this newly developed fondness for flats we 
are again guilty of imitating one of the effete 
civilizations — France this time — where it has 
long been the custom for families to content 
themselves with a story or two instead of a 
house; though we can claim the size and style 
of architedlure of the modern apartment pile as 
our special brand upon the adopted institution. 
The introduction of the custom here seems to me 
to be the result of exhaustion of the female ner- 
vous system. The American housewife, weary of 
the struggle to obtain efficient servants, having 
oscillated from all Catholics to all Protestants, 
from all Irish to all Swedes and back again, hav- 
ing experimented with negroes and Chinamen, 
and returned to pure white, having tried native 
help and been insulted, and reverted to the Cel- 

[6i] 



The Art of Living 

tic race, she — the long-sufFering — has sought 
the apartment-house as a haven of rest. She — 
the long-suffering — has assuredly been in a false 
position since the Declaration of Independence 
declared that all men are created equal, for she 
has been forced to cherish and preserve a do- 
mestic institution which popular sentiment has 
refused to recognize as consistent with the prin- 
ciples of Democracy. Our National creed, whe- 
ther presented in the primer or from the plat- 
form, has ever repudiated the idea of service 
when accompanied by an abatement of personal 
independence or confession of social inferiority. 
Therefore the native American woman has per- 
sistently refused, in the face of high wages and 
of exquisite moral suasion, to enter domestic 
service, and has preferred the shop or fadory 
to a comfortable home where she would have to 
crook the knee and say "Yes, ma'am." 

At the same time the native American woman, 
ever since "help " in the sense of social acquain- 
tances willing to accommodate for hire and dine 
with the family has ceased to adorn her kitchen 
and parlor, has been steadily forced by the de- 
mands of complex modern living to have ser- 
vants of her own. And where was she to obtain 

[62] 



The Dwelling 

them ? Excepting the negro, only among the 
emigrants of foreign countries, at first among 
the Irish, and presently among the English and 
Swedes, all of whom, unharassed by scruples as 
to a consequent loss of self-resped, have been 
prompt to recognize that this field of employ- 
ment lay open to them and was undisputed. 
They have come, and they still come in herds 
to our shores, raw and undisciplined, the over- 
flow from their own countries; and as fast as 
they arrive they are feverishly snapped up by 
the American housewife, who finds the need of 
servants more and more imperative; for some 
one must do the elaborate cooking, some one 
must do the fine washing, some one must polish 
the silver, rub the brasses, care for the lamps, 
and dust the bric-a-brac in her handsomest es- 
tablishment. And no one but the emigrant, or the 
son and daughter of the emigrant, is willing to. 
The consequence is that, though the native 
American woman is as resolute as ever in her 
own refusal to be a cook or waitress in a private 
family, domestic service exists as an institution 
no less completely than it exists in Europe, and 
pradlically under the same conditions, save that 
servants here receive considerably higher wages 

[63] 



The Art of Living 

than abroad because the demand is greater than 
the supply. There is a perpetual wail in all our 
cities and suburbs that the supply of competent 
cooks, and skilled laundresses and maids is so 
limited, and well-trained servants can demand 
pradlically their own prices. The conditions of 
service, however, are the same. That is, the ser- 
vant in the household of the free-born is still 
the servant; and still the servant in the house- 
hold where the mistress, who has prospered, 
would originally have gone into service had she 
not been free-born. For there is no one more 
prompt than the American housewife to keep a 
servant when she can afford one, and the more 
she is obliged to keep the prouder is she, though 
her nervous system may give way under the 
strain. By this I do not mean that the servants 
here are ill-treated. On the contrary, the consid- 
eration shown them is greater, and the quarters 
provided for them are far more comfortable on 
this side of the water than abroad. Indeed, ser- 
vants fare nowhere in the world so well as in the 
establishments of the well-to-do people of our 
large cities. Their bedrooms are suitable and often 
tasteful, they are attended by the family physi- 
cian if ill, they are not overworked, and very 

[64] 



The Dwelling 

slight checks are put on their liberty. But they 
are undeniably servants. The free-born Ameri- 
can mistress does not regard her servants as so- 
cial equals. She expeds them to stand up if they 
are sitting down when she enters the room. She 
expedls them to address her sons and daughters 
as Mr. Samuel and Miss Fanny, and to be called 
in turn Maggie or Albertine (or Thompson or 
Jones, a V anglaise) without a prefix. She does 
her best, in short, to preserve all the forms and 
all the deference on the one hand, and the haugh- 
tiness or condescension on the other which gov- 
ern the relations between servant and mistress 
abroad. 

From the fad: that we need so many more ser- 
vants than formerly, to care properly for our es- 
tablishments, the servant here is becoming more 
and more of a machine. That is, she is in nearly 
the same category with the eledric light and the 
furnace. We exped: him or her to be as unobtru- 
sive as possible, to perform work without a hitch, 
and not to draw upon our sympathies unneces- 
sarily. The mistress of one or two girls is sure to 
grow friendly and concerned as to their outside 
welfare, but when she has a staff of five or six, she 
is thankful if she is not obliged to know anything 

[65] 



The Art of Living 

about them. The letter which appeared in a New 
York newspaper some years ago, from an Ameri- 
can girl, in which she declared that she had left 
service because her master and his sons handed 
her their dripping umbrellas with the same air as 
they would have handed them to a graven image, 
was thoroughly in point. The reason the native 
American girl will not become a servant, in spite 
of the arguments of the rational and godly, is that 
service is the sole employment in this country in 
which she can be told with impunity that she is 
the social inferior of any one else. It is the telling 
which she cannot put up with. It is one thing to 
be conscious that the person you are constantly 
associated with is better educated, better man- 
nered, and more attractive than yourself, and it is 
another to be told at every opportunity that this 
is so. In the shop, in the fadory, and in other 
walks of life, whatever her real superiors may 
think of her, they must treat her as a social equal. 
Even that shrill-voiced, banged, bangled, imper- 
tinent, slangy, vulgar produd: of our mammoth 
retail dry-goods system, who seems to believe 
herself a pattern of ladylike behavior, is aware 
in her heart that she does not know how to be- 
have, and yearns to resemble the well-bred woman 

[66] 



The Dwelling 

whom she daily insults. But the happiness of her 
life, and its main-spring, too, lies in the conscious- 
ness that she is free to become the first lady in 
the land, and that she herself is to be her sole 
critic and detradtor. Why is she not right in re- 
fusing to sacrifice her independence ? Why should 
she sell her birthright for a mess of pottage ? 

An anomalous condition of affairs is presented 
by this contrast between the free-born American 
woman as a mistress and as a revolter against 
domestic service, and it seems to me that one of 
two things must come to pass. Necessarily we 
shall continue to have cooks, waiting-maids, and 
laundresses ; at least our food must be prepared, 
our drawing-rooms dusted, and our linen ironed 
by some one. But either we shall have to accept 
and acknowledge the existence among us of a 
class, recruited from foreign emigrants and their 
descendants, which is tarred with the brush of 
social proscription in diredl violation of demo- 
cratic principles, or we must change the condi- 
tions of domestic service — change them so that 
condescension and servility vanish, and the con- 
tract of service becomes like the other contrails 
of employment between man and man, and man 
and woman. 

[67] 



The Art of Living 

It is fruitless now to inquire what the free-born 
American woman would have done without the 
foreign emigrant to cook and wash for her. The 
question is whether, now that she has her, she is 
going to keep her, and keep her in the same com- 
fortable and well-paid but palpable thraldom as 
at present. If so, she will be merely imitating the 
housewives of the effete civilizations ; she will be 
doing simply what every English, French, and 
German woman does and has done ever since 
class distinctions began. But in that case, surely, 
we shall be no longer able to proclaim our immu- 
nity from caste, and our Fourth of July orators 
will find some difficulty in showing that other 
nations are more effete in this resped than our- 
selves. Twenty-five years more of development 
in our houses, hotels, and restaurants, if con- 
duced on present lines, will produce an enor- 
mous ducking and scraping, fee-seeking, livery- 
wearing servant class,whichwillgofar to establish 
the claim put forth by some of our critics, that 
equality on this side of the water means only po- 
litical equality, and that our class distinctions, 
though not so obvious, are no less genuine than 
elsewhere. In this event the only logical note of 
explanation to send to the Powers will be that 

[68] 



The Dwelling 

social equality was never contemplated by the 
signers of the Declaration of Independence, and 
that, though it is true that any man may become 
President of the United States, there are as great 
inequalities in morals, intelle6l, and manners 
among sons of liberty as among the subjeds of 
the Czar. To this the Powers will be justified 
in uttering a disappointed and slightly ironical 
" Oh ! " But perhaps the foreign emigrant will 
have something to say on the subjedl. Perhaps 
the horde from across the seas, now lured by 
high wages, will decrease in numbers, or it may 
be that their descendants here will learn through 
contadl with the free-born revolter against do- 
mestic service to revolt too. 

What would the free-born American mistress 
do then ? With the free-born revolter still ob- 
durate, and the foreign emigrant ceasing to emi- 
grate or recalcitrant, she would be in an unplea- 
sant ^^ in her elaborate establishment conducted 
on effete principles. In this pradical dilemma, 
rather than in an awakened moral sense, seems 
to lie our best hope of regeneration, for it cannot 
be denied that the free-born American mistress 
is doing all she can at present to perpetuate the 
foreign idea of domestic service, and it seems 



The Art of Living 

probable that so long as the foreign emigrant is 
willing to be bribed the true principles of demo- 
cracy will be violated. Already the difficulty of 
obtaining servants is inducing home-loving fami- 
lies to seek the apartment-house. A more dis- 
tind: dearth would speedily change the relations 
between mistress and servant into that of con- 
tractor and contradee, as in other employments 
in this country. It may be that the descendants 
of the emigrant will be unable to resist the lure 
offered them, and that the free-born mistress 
will triumph. If so, we shall become no better 
and possibly no worse than the effete civiliza- 
tions we promised to make blush by the worth 
of our institutions. 



[70] 



House- Furnishing and the 
Commissariat . I. 



jFTER a man and his wife have 

A^^... made up their minds whether to 
^P live in a town house or subur- 
^^S ban villa, they are obliged to con- 
^^^^p sider next what they will have 
in the way of furniture, and presently what they 
will have for dinner. The consciousness that a 
house has nothing in it but the barest fixtures 
— the gasometer, the water-tanks, and the elec- 
tric wires — and that it is for you and your wife 
to decide exadly what shall go into it in the way 
of wall-papers, carpets, upholstery, and objeds 
of virtu, is inspiring, even though your purse be 
not plethoric and your knowledge of aesthetics 
Hmited. The thought at once presents itself that 
here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate 
how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you 
set eagerly to work to surpass your predecessors 
of equal means. It is a worthy ambition to en- 
deavor to make the matrimonial nest or the 
home of maturer years attradive, and if we were 
to peer back far enough into the past of even 
this country, to the time when our great great- 

[71 ] 



The Art of Living 

grandmothers set up housekeeping with our 
great great-grandfathers, we should find that fur- 
nishing was considered a seriously delightful mat- 
ter, though not perhaps the almost sacred trust 
we regard it to-day. I mean our great great- 
grandparents who used to live in those charming 
old colonial houses, and who owned the mahog- 
any desks with brass handles and claw feet, the 
tall clocks, the ravishing andirons, and all the 
other old-fashioned furniture which is now so 
precious and difficult to find. Distance may lend 
such enchantment to a spinning-wheel, a warm- 
ing-pan, or a spinnet, that one is liable to become 
hysterical in praise of them, and a calm, aesthetic 
mind, outside the limits of an antique furniture 
dealer's store, would be justified in stigmatizing 
many of the now cherished effed;s of our great 
great-grandparents as truck; but, on the other 
hand, who will dispute that they possessed very 
many lovely things ? They had an eye for grace- 
ful shapes in their sideboards and tables; some- 
how the curves they imparted to the backs of 
their chairs cannot be duplicated now so as to 
look the same; and the patterns of the satins, 
flowered chintzes, and other stuflFs which they 
used for covers and curtains, exercise a witchery 

[72] 



House-Furnishing ^ c. 

upon us, even as we see them now frayed and 
faded, which cannot proceed wholly from the 
imagination. 

They had no modern comforts, poor things; 
no furnaces, no ice-chests, no set bath-tubs, no 
running water, no sanitary improvements, no 
gas or eledlric light; and their pidluresque kitchen 
hearths, with great caldrons and cranes and lea- 
ther blowers, must have been exceedingly incon- 
venient to cook in; but even their most incom- 
modious appliances were not without artistic 
charm. 

After them came the deluge — the era of 
horse-hair, the Sahara of democratic unloveli- 
ness, when in every house, in every country 
town, the set best room, which was never used 
by the family, stood like a mortuary chapel 
solely for the reception of guests. In the cities, 
in the households of the then enlightened, rep 
— generally green — was frequently substituted 
for the sable horse-hair. Then came the days 
when a dining-room or drawing-room was fur- 
nished in one pervasive hue — a suit of sables, a 
brick red, a dark green, or a deep maroon. Ev- 
erything matched; the chairs and tables, desks 
and book-cases were bought in sets at one fell 

[73 ] 



The Art of Living 

swoop by the householder of the period who de- 
sired to produce artistic efFedts. For forty years 
or so this was the prevaihng fashion, and the 
limit of purely indigenous expression. 

To it presently succeeded the aesthetic phase, 
borrowed from England. Then, instead of select- 
ing everything to match, a young or old couple 
bought so as just not to match, but to harmon- 
ize. All sorts of queer and subtle shades and tints 
in wall-papers and fabrics appeared, principally 
dallyings with and improvisings upon green, 
brown, and yellow; frescos and dados were the 
rage; and a wave of interest in the scope and 
mission of eccentric color spread over the land. 
Valuable as this movement was as an educational 
fador, there was nothing American in it; or in 
other words, we were again simply imitative. The 
very fad:, however, that we were ready to imitate, 
betokened that horse-hair and rep had ceased 
to satisfy national aspiration, and that we were 
willing to accept suggestions from without, in- 
asmuch as no native prophet had arisen. But 
though the impetus came from abroad, the awak- 
ening was genuine. Since then the desire to fur- 
nish tastefully has been steadily waxing among 
the more well-to-do portion of the population. 

[74] 



Ho use- Fu mis king ^ c . 

As in the case of architedlure, the increasing in- 
terest has called into existence a professional 
class, which, though still small and less generally 
employed than their house-designing brethren, 
is beginning to play an important part in the 
education of the public taste in internal house 
decoration and equipment. The idea that any 
man or woman may be more fitted than his 
or her neighbor to choose a carpet or a wall- 
paper has been grudgingly admitted, and still 
irritates the average house-owner who is ready 
to furnish. But the masters, and more conspic- 
uously the mistresses, of the competing superb 
establishments in our cities, have learned, from 
the sad experience of some of their predeces- 
sors, to swallow their individual trust in their 
own powers of seledlion, and to put themselves 
unreservedly into the clutches of a professional 
house decorator. 

Furnishing a mammoth establishment from 
top to bottom with somebody else's money, and 
plenty of it, must be a delightful occupation. 
There can be no carking consciousness of price 
to ad: as a drag on genius, and it would seem as 
though the house decorator who was not inter- 
fered with under these circumstances had a rare 

[75] 



The Art of Living 

chance to show what is what. When he fails, 
which is by no means out of the question, he 
can ordinarily shift the responsibility on to his 
employer, for an employer can rarely resist the 
temptation of insisting on some one touch to 
prove his or her own capacity, and of course it 
is a simple matter for the man of art to demon- 
strate that this one touch has spoiled everything. 
The temptation to try to be as original and cap- 
tivating in results as possible must be almost ir- 
resistible, especially when one's elbow is con- 
stantly jogged by furniture and other dealers, 
who are only too eager to reproduce a Directory 
drawing-room or any other old-time splendor. 
But there is no denying that, whatever his limi- 
tations, the house decorator is becoming the best 
of educators on this side of the water, for though 
we cannot afford or have too much confidence in 
our own taste to employ him, our wives watch 
him like cats and are taking in his ideas through 
the pores, if not diredlly. 

There are, it is true, almost as many diverse 
styles of internal ornamentation as of external ar- 
chitedure in our modern residences, for everyone 
who has, or thinks he has, an aptitude for furnish- 
ing is trying his professional or 'prentice hand, 

[76] 



House-Furnishing ^ c . 

sometimes with startling results ; yet the diversi- 
ties seem less significant than in the case of exter- 
nal architecture, or perhaps it may be said that 
the sum total of efFed is much nearer to finality 
or perfection. If as a nation we are deriving the 
inspiration for the furniture and upholsteries of 
our drawing-rooms and libraries from the best 
French and Dutch models of a century or more 
ago, we certainly can boast that the comfortable 
features which distinguish our apartments from 
their prototypes are a native growth. If as a peo- 
ple we cannot yet point to great original artistic 
triumphs, may we not claim the spacious and dig- 
nified contemporary refrigerator, the convenient 
laundry, the frequently occurring and palatial 
bath-room, the health-conducing ventilator-pipe 
and sanitary fixtures, and the various eledlrical 
and other pipes, tubes, and appliances which 
have become a part of every well-ordered house, 
as a national cult ? To be genuinely comfortable 
in every-day life seems to have become the aim 
all the world over of the individual seeking to 
live wisely, and the rest of the world is in our 
debt for the many valuable mechanical aids to 
comfort in the home which have been invented 
on this side of the water. 

[77] 



The Art of Living 

This quest for comfort is being constantly 
borne in mind also in the aesthetic sense. We 
fit our drawing-rooms now to live in as well as 
to look at. We exped: to sit on our sofas and in 
our easy chairs ; hence we try to make them at- 
tractive to the back as well as to the eye. Though 
our wives may still occasionally pull down the 
window-shades to exclude a too dangerous sun, 
they no longer compel us to view our best rooms 
from the threshold as a cold, flawless, forbidden 
land. The extreme aesthetic tendencies which were 
rampant twenty years ago have been toned down 
by this inclination, among even our most elabo- 
rate house-furnishers, to produce the effe6t that 
rooms are intended for every-day use by rational 
beings. The ultra-queer colors have disappeared, 
and the carpets and wall-papers no longer sug- 
gest perpetual biliousness or chronic nightmare. 

I think, too, the idea that a drawing-room can 
be made bewitchingly cosey by crowding it with 
all one's beautiful and ugly earthly possessions 
has been demonstrated to be a delusion. In these 
days of many wedding presents, it is difficult for 
young people to resist the temptation of showing 
all they have received. I remember that Mrs. 
George J. Spriggs — she was the daughter, you 

[78] 



House-Furnishing &^ c . 



will remember, of ex- Assistant Postmaster-Gen- 
eral Homer W. Green — had seven lamps in her 
parlor in Locust Road, three of them with um- 
brageous Japanese shades. Her husband ex- 
plained to me that there had been a run on 
lamps and pepper-pots in their individual case. 
Now, Mrs. Julius Caesar would have managed 
more cleverly. She would have made the lamp- 
dealer exchange four or five of the lamps for, say, 
an ornamental brass fender, a brass coal-scuttle, 
or a Japanese tea-tray, and have made the jewel- 
ler substitute some equally desirable table orna- 
ments for the pepper-pots. And yet, when I made 
my wedding call on Mrs. Caesar, ten years ago, I 
remember thinking that her drawing-room was a 
sort of compromise between a curiosity shop and 
a menagerie. To begin with, I stumbled over the 
head of a tiger skin, which confronted me as I 
passed through the portiere^ so that I nearly fell 
into the arms of my hostess. It seemed to me 
that I had stepped into a veritable bazaar. A large 
bear skin lay before the fire as a hearth-rug, and 
on either side of the grate squatted a large, ori- 
entally conceived china dragon with an open 
mouth. Here and there, under furniture or in 
corners, were gaping frogs in bronze or china. A 

[79] 



The Art of Living 

low plush-covered table was densely arrayed with 
small china dogs of every degree. On another 
table was spread a number of silver ornaments — 
a silver snuff-box, a silver whistle, a silver feather, 
a silver match-box, and a silver shoe-buckle — all 
objeds of virtu of apparently antique workman- 
ship. There were three lamps with ornamental 
shades — a fluted china shade, a paper shade in 
semblance of a full-blown rose, and a yellow satin 
shade with drooping fringe. From the low stud- 
ded ceiling depended a vast Japanese paper lan- 
tern. Sundry and divers china vases and shep- 
herdesses occupied the mantel-piece and the top 
of the book-case,and had overflowed on to awrit- 
ing-table supplied with brass ornaments. There 
were numerous pidures, large and small, on the 
walls, under many of which colored china plates 
had been hung. There were photographs in frames 
everywhere. The adual space where I could stand 
without knocking over anything was about the 
size of a hat bath, and was shut in by a circle of 
low chairs and divans besprinkled with aesthetic 
yellow, green, and pink soft silk cushions. On 
one of these divans my hostess was reclining in 
a Grosvenor gallery tea-gown, so that she seemed 
to wallow in cushions, and Julius Caesar himself 

[80] 



House-Furnishing ^ c , 

was sunk in the depths of one of the chairs, so 
near the ground that his knees seemed to rest on 
his chin, and one might fairly have taken him for 
another china frog of extraordinary proportions. 
All this in a comparatively small room where 
there were several other knick-knacks which I 
have omitted to mention. Better this, perhaps, 
than the drawing-room of forty years ago, when 
the visitor's gaze was bounded by cold green rep, 
and he was restrained only by decorum from hurl- 
ing into the fire the tidy or antimacassar which 
tickled his neck, or detached itself and wriggled 
down between his back and the back of the chair. 
But Mrs. Caesar's drawing-room, in her new 
house on Belport Avenue, has been furnished 
from a very different point of view than her first 
one, which shows how rapidly tastes change in 
a progressive society. Mrs. Cassar and Julius 
chose everything themselves this time as they 
did before, but they had learned from experi- 
ence, and from the new work of the contempo- 
rary decorator. There is plenty of unoccupied 
space now to show her possessions to advantage, 
and there are not too many possessions visible 
for the size of the parlor; there is neither so 
much uniformity of color and design as to weary 

[8i ] 



T'he Art of Living 

the eye, nor so much variety or eccentricity as 
to irritate it; consequently, the efFed: on the visi- 
tor is not that he is in a room intended for lux- 
urious display, but in an exquisitely furnished 
room adapted for daily use. In other words, the 
controlling idea at present, of those who seek to 
make their houses charming, seems to be to 
combine comfort with elegance so skilfully that 
while one may realize the latter, one is conscious 
only of the former. Though decorators are still 
experimenting, as probably they always will be, 
to attain novel effeds, they are disposed to make 
use of queer or attenuated hues, Moorish bla- 
zonry, stamped leather, peacock feathers, ele- 
phant tusks, stained-glass windows, and Japanese 
lacquer-work with much more discretion than a 
few years ago. Virgin-white instead of dirt-brown 
lights up our halls and stair-cases, and the vast 
chandeliers which used to dazzle the eye no 
longer dangle from the ceiling. Indeed, it seems 
as though it would be difficult to make the in- 
terior of the homes of our well-to-do class more 
comfortable and attractive than they are at pre- 
sent. It may be that some of our very rich people 
are disposed to waste their energies in devising 
and striving for more consummate elegance, 

[82] 



Ho use- Fu mis king &^ c . 

thereby exposing us all to the charge that we are 
becoming too luxurious for our spiritual good. 
But there can be little question that the ambition 
to surround one's self with as much beauty, con- 
sistent with comfort, as one can afford is desir- 
able, even from the ethical standpoint. 

Undeniably our point of view has changed ex- 
traordinarily in the last thirty years in regard to 
house-furnishing, as in regard to so many other 
matters of our material welfare, and there cer- 
tainly is some ground for fearing that the pen- 
dulum is swinging just at present too far in the 
diredion opposite to that of high thinking and 
low living; but, after all, though the readlion 
from ugliness has been and continues to be ex- 
uberant, it is as yet by no means wide-embracing. 
In fad, our cultivated well-to-do class — though 
it is well abreast of the rest of the civilized world 
in aspiration and not far behind it in accomplish- 
ment, with certain vivifying traits of its own 
which the old world societies do not possess or 
have lost — is still comparatively small; and 
there is still so much Stygian darkness outside it 
in respedl to house-furnishing and home comfort 
in general, that we can afford to have the exuber- 
ance continue for the present; for there is some 

[83] 



The Art of Living 

reason to believe that most of the descendants 
of our old high thinkers have become high livers, 
or at least, if low livers, have ceased to be high 
thinkers. Mutton-soup for breakfast and unat- 
tractive domestic surroundings seem to comport 
nowadays with ignoble aims, if nothing worse; 
moreover, it must not be forgotten that the plain 
people of the present is no longer the plain peo- 
ple of forty years ago, but is largely the seed of 
the influx of foreign peasants, chiefly inferior 
and often scum, which the sacredness of our in- 
stitutions has obliged us to receive. 



[84] 



House-Furnishing and the 
Commissariat. II. 



^F we have become cosmopolitan in 
y gp the matter of domestic comfort and 
^ elegance as regards our drawing- 
l^^l^ rooms, the same is certainly true of 
our dining-rooms, and dinner-tables. But here 
it seems to me that we are more justly open to 
criticism on the score of over-exuberance. That 
is, the fairly well-to-do class, for the plain peo- 
ple of foreign blood, and the low liver of native 
blood, eat almost as indigestible food, and quite 
as rapidly and unceremoniously, as the pie and 
doughnut nurtured yeoman of original Yankee 
stock, who thrived in spite of his diet, and left 
to his grandchildren the heritage of dyspepsia 
which has become nervous prostration in the pre- 
sent generation. It seems as though our instinds 
of hospitality have grown in dire6t ratio with our 
familiarity with and adoption of civilized crea- 
ture comforts, and any charge of exuberance 
may doubtless be fairly ascribed to the national 
trait of generosity, the abuse of which is after 
all a noble blemish. But, on the other hand, 
fads remain, even after one has given a pleasing 

[85] 



The Art of Living 

excuse for their existence, and it may be doubted 
if a spendthrift is long consoled by the reflection 
that his impecuniosity is due to his own disin- 
clination to stint. May it not truthfully be 
charged against the reasonably well-to-do Amer- 
ican citizen that he has a prejudice against thrift, 
especially where the entertainment of his fellow 
man or woman is concerned ? The rapid growth 
of wealth and the comparative facility of becom- 
ing rich during the last half century of our de- 
velopment, has operated against the pradlice of 
small economies, so that we find ourselves now 
beset by extravagant traditions which we hesi- 
tate to deviate from for fear of seeming mean. 
Many a man to-day pays his quarter of a dollar 
ruefully and begrudgingly to the colored Pull- 
man car porter at the end of his journey, when 
he is "brushed off," because he cannot bring him- 
self to break the custom which fixed the fee. It 
would be interesting to estimate what the grand 
total of saving to the American travelling public 
would have been if ten instead of twenty-five 
cents a head had been paid to the tyrant in ques- 
tion since he first darkened the situation. If not 
enough to maintain free schools for the negro, at 
least sufficient to compel railroad managements 

[86] 



House-Furnishing ^ c. 

to give their employees suitable wages instead 
of letting the easy-going traveller, who has al- 
ready paid for the privilege of a reserved seat, 
pay a premium on that. The exorbitant fees be- 
stowed on waiters is but another instance of a 
tendency to be over-generous, which, once re- 
duced to custom, becomes the severest kind of 
tax, in that it is likely to afFed the warmest- 
hearted people. 

This tendency to be needlessly lavish in ex- 
penditure is most conspicuous when we are of- 
fering hospitality in our own homes. Among the 
viands which we have added to the bills of fare 
of humanity, roast turkey and cranberry-sauce, 
Indian meal, and probably baked beans, are en- 
titled to conspicuous and honorable mention, but 
is it not true, notwithstanding champagne is a 
foreign wine, that the most prodigious discovery 
in the line of food or drink yet made by the well- 
to-do people of this country, is the discovery of 
champagne ? Does it not flow in one golden ef- 
fervescing stream, varied only by the pops caused 
by the drawing of fresh corks, from the Statue 
of Liberty Enlightening the World to the Gold- 
en Gate ? And the circumstance that every pop 
costs the entertainer between three and four dol- 

[87] 



The Art of Living 

lars, seems in no wise to interrupt the cheery ex- 
plosions. There are some people who do not 
drink champagne or any other wine, from prin- 
ciple, and there are some with whom it does not 
agree, but the average individual finds that the 
interest of festive occasions is heightened by its 
presence in reasonable abundance, and is apt to 
deplore its total absence with internal groans. 
But surely ninety-nine men in our large cities 
out of one hundred, who are accustomed to en- 
tertain and be entertained, must be weary of the 
sight of this expensive tempter at the feast, which 
it is so difficult to refuse when set before one, and 
which is so often quaffed against better judgment 
or inclination. The champagne breakfast, the 
champagne luncheon, the champagne dinner, and 
the champagne supper, with a champagne cock- 
tail tossed in as a stop-gap, hound the social fa- 
vorite from January to December, until he is fain 
to dream of the Old Oaken Bucket, and sooner 
or later to drink Lithia water only. 

With perpetual and unremitting champagne 
as the key-note of social gatherings, no wonder 
that the table ornaments and the comestibles be- 
come more splendid. A little dinner of eight or 
ten is no longer a simple matter of a cordial in- 

[ 88 ] 



House-Furnishing ^ c . 

vitation and an extra course. The hostess who 
bids her contemporaries to dine with her most 
informally ten days hence, uses a figure of speech 
which is innocuous from the fad: that it is known 
to be a deliberate falsehood. She begins gener- 
ally by engaging a cook from outside to prepare 
the dinner, which must surely wound the sensi- 
bilities of any self-respe6ting couple the first time, 
however hardened to the situation they may be- 
come later. 

At this stage of my reflexions I am interrupted 
by my wife, Barbara — for I was thinking aloud 
— with a few words of expostulation. 

" Are you not a little severe ? I assume that 
you are referring now to people with a comfort- 
able income, but who are not disgustingly rich. 
Of course, nowadays, the very rich people keep 
cooks who can cook for a dinner-party, cooks at 
eight dollars or more a week and a kitchen maid ; 
so it is only the hostess with a cook at four and 
a half to six dollars a week and no kitchen maid 
who is likely to engage an accommodator. But 
what is the poor thing to do ? Give a wretched, 
or plain dinner which may make her hair grow 
white in a single night ? Surely, when a woman 
invites friends to her house she does not wish 

[89] 



The Art of Living 

them to go away half starved, or remembering 
that they have had disagreeable things to eat. 
In that case she would prefer not to entertain at 
all/' 

" The question is/' I answered, " whether it is 
more sensible to try to be content with what one 
has, or to vie with those who are better off. We 
do not attempt to dine on gold plate, nor have 
we a piano decorated with a five-thousand-dollar 
painting by one of the great artists, like Patter- 
son, the banker. Why should we endeavor to 
compete with his kitchen ? " 

" The clever thing, of course, is to find a cook 
for six dollars a week who can cook for a dinner- 
party," answered Barbara, pensively ; " and yet," 
she added," though our cook can, the chances are 
that nine out of ten of the people who dine with 
us think that we hired her for the occasion." 

" Precisely. Just because the custom has grown 
so. It is sheer extravagance." 

" After all, my dear, it is a comparatively small 
matter — a five-dollar bill." 

" Pardon me. Five dollars for the cook, be- 
cause one's own cook is not good enough ; three 
or five dollars for an accommodating maid or 
waiter, because you cannot trust your chamber- 

[90] 



House- Furn is king 

maid to assist your waitress ; eight dollars for 
champagne, and so on.'* 

" Do not say ' your ' — mine can." 

" Her, then — the woman of the day. I am try- 
ing to show that a small informal dinner is a 
cruelly expensive affair for the average man with 
a comfortable working income." 

" I admit that a dinner for eight or ten is ex- 
pensive," said Barbara. " It means twenty-five 
dollars at the lowest, even if you have your own 
cook. But what is one to do ? You don't seem 
to appreciate that a good plain cook cannot usu- 
ally prepare dinner-party dishes, and that a plain 
dinner is now almost as different from a dinner- 
party dinner as a boiled tgg is from caviare." 

" Precisely. There is the pity of it. The growth 
here of the French restaurant and the taste for 
rich and elaborate cookery has doubtless been a 
good thing in its way, if only that it is now pos- 
sible to obtain a tolerably well-cooked meal at 
most of the hotels in our large cities and principal 
watering-places ; but why should people of mod- 
erate means and social instindls feel constrained 
to offer a banquet on every occasion when they 
entertain ? I for one consider it a bore to have 
so much provided when I go out to dinner." 

[91 ] 



The Art of Living 

" You must admit," said Barbara, " that din- 
ners are not nearly so long as they were a few 
years ago. Now, by means of the extra service 
you complain of, and by keeping the number of 
courses down, a dinner ought not to last longer 
than an hour and a half, whereas it used to take 
two hours and over. In England they are much 
worse than here. You are given, for instance, 
two puddings, one after the other, and ices to 
follow." 

" I agree," said I, " that we have curtailed the 
length so that there is not much to complain of 
on that score. I think, though, that compara- 
tively plain dishes well served are quite as apt 
to please as the aspics, chartreuses, timbales, and 
other impressive gallicisms under which the ac- 
commodating party cook is wont to cater to the 
palates of informally invited guests. I sometimes 
think that the very few of our great great-grand- 
fathers who knew how to live at all must have 
had more appetizing tables than we. Their family 
cooks, from all accounts, knew how to roast and 
boil and bake and stew, culinary arts which some- 
how seem to be little understood by the chefs 
of to-day. Then again, the old-fashioned Delft 
crockery — blue ships sailing on a blue sea — was 

[9^] 



House-Furnishing ^ c . 

very attractive. Our modern dinner-tables, when 
arrayed for a party, have almost too much fuss 
and feathers. Women worry until they get cut 
glass, if it is not given them as a wedding pre- 
sent, and several sets of costly plates — Sevres, 
Dresden, or Crown Derby — are apt to seem 
indispensable to housekeepers of comparatively 
limited means." 

" Cut glass is lovely, and the same plates 
through seven courses are rather trying," said 
Barbara, parenthetically. 

"Of course it is lovely, and I am very glad 
you have some. But is not the modern Ameri- 
can woman of refined sensibilities just a little too 
eager to crowd her table with every article of 
virtu she possesses — every ornamental spoon, 
dish, cup, and candlestick — until one is unable 
to see at any one spot more than a square inch 
of tablecloth ? In the centre of the table she sets 
a crystal bowl of flowers, a silver basket of ferns, 
or a dish of fruit. This is flanked by apostle or 
gold-lined spoons, silver dishes of confectionery 
of various kinds, silver candlesticks or candela- 
bra fitted with pink or saflFron shades, one or two 
of which are expec5led to catch fire, an array of 
cut glass or Venetian glass at every plate, and, 

[93] 



The Art of Living 

like as not, pansies strewn all over the table." 
"The modern dinner-table is very pretty," 
responded Barbara. " I don't see how it could 
be improved materially." 

"I dare say, but somehow one can't help 
thinkinor at times that the effort for effed: is too 
noticeable, and that the real objed: of sitting down 
to dinner in company, agreeable social inter- 
course, is consequently lost sight of If only the 
very rich were guilty of wanton display, the an- 
swer would be that the rank and file of our well- 
to-do, sensible people have very simple enter- 
tainments. Unfortunately, while the very rich 
are constantly vying to outstrip one another, the 
dinner-table and the dinner of the well-to-do 
American are each growing more and more com- 
plex and elaborate. Perhaps not more so than 
abroad among the nobility or people of means; 
but certainly we have been Europeanized in this 
resped to such an extent that, not only is there 
pradically nothing left for us to learn in the way 
of being luxurious, but I am not sure that we 
are not disposed to convince the rest of the civi- 
lized world that a free-born American, when 
fully developed, can be the most luxurious in- 
dividual on earth." 

[ 94 ] 



Ho use- Fu rnishi?tg ^ c . 

Barbara looked a little grave at this. " Every- 
thing used to be so ugly and unattradive a little 
while ago that I suppose our heads have been 
turned/* she answered. "After this I shall make 
a rule, when we give a dinner-party, to keep one- 
half of my table ornaments in the safe as a re- 
buke to my vanity. Only if I am to show so 
much of the tablecloth, I shall have to buy some 
with handsome patterns. Don't you see?" 

Perhaps this suggestion that our heads have 
been turned for the time being by our national 
prosperity, and that they will become straight 
again in due course of time, is the most sensible 
view to take of the situation. There can be no 
doubt that among well-to-do people, who would 
objed to be classed in "the smart set," as the re- 
porters of social gossip odiously charadlerize 
those prominent in fashionable society in our 
large cities, the changes in the last thirty years 
connected with every-day living, as well as with 
entertaining, have all been in the direction of 
cosmopolitan usage. It is now only a very old- 
fashioned or a very blatant person who objects to 
the use of evening dress at the dinner-table, or 
the theatre, as inconsistent with true patriotism. 
The dinner-hour has steadily progressed from 

[95] 



The Art of Living 

twelve o'clock noon until it has halted at seven 
post meridian, as the ordinary hour for the most 
formal meal of the day, with further postpone- 
ment to half-past seven or even eight among the 
fashionable for the sake of company. The fry- 
ing-pan and the tea-pot have ceased to reign su- 
preme as the patron saints of female nutrition, 
and the beefsteak, the egg, both cooked and raw, 
milk and other flesh-and-blood-producing food 
are abundantly supplied to the rising generation 
of both sexes by the provident parent of to-day. 
The price of beef in our large cities has steadily 
advanced in price until its use as an article of 
diet is a serious monster to encounter in the 
monthly bills, but the husband and father who 
is seeking to live wisely, seems not to be de- 
terred from providing it abundantly. 

From this it is evident that if we are unduly 
exuberant in the pursuit of creature comforts, it 
is not solely in the line of purely ornamental lux- 
uries. If we continue to try our nervous systems 
by undue exertion, they are at least better fitted 
to stand the strain, by virtue of plenty of nutri- 
tious food, even though dinner-parties tempt us 
now and then to over-indulgence, or bore us by 
their elaborateness. Yet it remains to be seen 

[96] 



House-Furnishing &^ c . 

whether the income of the American husband 
and father will be able to stand the steady drain 
occasioned by the liberal table he provides, and 
it may be that we have some lessons in thrift on 
this score still in store for us. There is this con- 
solation, that if our heads have been turned in 
this respedl also, and we are supplying more food 
for our human furnaces than they need, the force 
of any readtion will not fall on us, but on the 
market-men, who are such a privileged class that 
our candidates for public office commonly pro- 
vide a rally for their special edification just be- 
fore eledion-day, and whose white smock-frocks 
are commonly a cloak for fat though greasy 
purses. Yet Providence seems to smile on the 
market-man in that it has given him the tele- 
phone, through which the modern mistress can 
order her dinner, or command chops or birds, 
when unexpected guests are foreshadowed. Ow- 
ing to the multiplicity of the demands upon the 
time of both men and women, the custom of 
going to market in person has largely fallen into 
decay. The butcher and grocer send assistants 
to the house for orders, and the daily personal 
encounter with the smug man in white, which 
used to be as inevitable as the dinner, has now 

[97] 



The Art of Living 

mainly been relegated to the blushing bride of 
from one week to two years' standing, and the 
people who pay cash for everything. Very likely 
we are assessed for the privilege of not being 
obliged to nose our turkeys and see our chops 
weighed in advance, and it is difficult to answer 
the strictures of those who sigh for what they 
call the good old times, when it was every man's 
duty, before he went to his office, to look over 
his butcher's entire stock and seled: the fattest 
and juiciest edibles for the consumption of him- 
self and family. As for paying cash for every- 
thing, my wife Barbara says that, unless people 
are obliged to be extremely economical, no wo- 
man in this age of nervous prostration ought to 
run the risk of bringing on that dire malady by 
any such imprudence, and that to save five dol- 
lars a month on a butcher's bill, and pay twenty- 
five to a physician for ruined nerves, is false po- 
litical economy. 

" I agree with you," she added, " that we 
Americans live extravagantly in the matter of 
daily food — especially meat — as compared with 
the general run of people in other countries ; but 
far more serious than our appetites and liberal 
habits, in my opinion, is the horrible waste which 

[98] 



House-Furnishing ^ c . 



goes on in our kitchens, due to the fad that our 
cooks are totally ignorant of the art of making the 
most of things. Abroad, particularly on the Conti- 
nent, they understand how to utilize every scrap, 
so that many a comfortable meal is provided from 
what our servants habitually cast into the swill- 
tub. Here there is perpetual waste — waste — 
waste, and no one seems to understand how to pre- 
vent it. There you have one never-failing reason 
for the size of our butchers' and grocers* bills." 
I assume that my wife, who is an intelligent 
person, must be corred in this accusation of 
general wastefulness which she makes against the 
American kitchen. If so, here we are confronted 
again with the question of domestic service from 
another point of view. How long can we afford 
to throw our substance into the swill-tub ? If our 
emigrant cooks do not understand the art of uti- 
lizing scraps and remnants, are we to continue to 
enrich our butchers without let or hindrance ? It 
would seem that if the American housewife does 
not take this matter in hand promptly, the cruel 
laws of political economy will soon convince her 
by grisly experience that neither poetry nor phi- 
lanthropy can flourish in a land where there is 
perpetual waste below stairs. 

[99] 



Education 
I. 



IN occasions of oratory in this 

O^^ country, nothing will arouse an 
3j^ < audience more quickly than an 



:> 



m 



>Si. A^ allusion to our public school sys- 

^g^gJ^J^ teni, and any speaker who sees 
fit to apostrophize it is certain to be fervidly 
applauded. Moreover, in private conversation, 
whether with our countrymen or with foreign- 
ers, every citizen is prone to indulge in the state- 
ment, commonly uttered with some degree of 
emotion, that our public schools are the great 
bulwarks of progressive democracy. Why, then, 
is the American parent, as soon as he becomes 
well-to-do, apt to send his children elsewhere ? 

I was walking down town with a friend the 
other day, and he asked me casually where I sent 
my boys to school. When I told him that they 
attended a public school he said, promptly, " Good 
enough. I like to see a man do it. It *s the right 
thing." I acquiesced modestly ; then, as I knew 
that he had a boy of his own, I asked him the 
same question. 

" My son," he replied slowly, " goes to Mr. 

[ lOO ] 



Education 



Bingham's" — indicating a private school for 
boys in the neighborhood. " He is a little deli- 
cate — that is, he had measles last summer, and 
has never quite recovered his strength. I had al- 
most made up my mind to send him to a public 
school, so that he might mix with all kinds of 
boys, but his mother seemed to think that the 
chances of his catching scarlet fever or diphtheria 
would be greater, and she has an idea that he 
would make undesirable acquaintances and learn 
things which he should n't. So, on the whole, 
we decided to send him to Bingham's. But I 
agree that you are right." 

There are many men in the community who, 
like my friend, believe thoroughly that every one 
would do well to send his boys to a public school 
— that is, every one but themselves. When it 
comes to the case of their own flesh and blood 
they hesitate, and in nine instances out often, on 
some plea or other, turn their backs on the prin- 
ciples they profess. This is especially true in our 
cities, and it has been more or less true ever since 
the Declaration of Independence ; and as a proof 
of the flourishing condition of the tendency at 
present, it is necessary merely to instance the 
numerous private schools all over the country. 

[ loi ] 



The Art of Living 

The pupils at these private schools are the chil- 
dren of our people of means and social promi- 
nence, the people who ought to be the most pa- 
triotic citizens of the Republic. 

I frankly state that I, for one, would not send 
my boys to a public school unless I believed the 
school to be a good one. Whatever other mo- 
tives may influence parents, there is no doubt 
that many are finally deterred from sending their 
boys to a public school by the conviction that the 
education offered to their sons in return for taxes 
is inferior to what can be obtained by private con- 
trad. Though a father may be desirous to have 
his boys understand early the theory of demo- 
cratic equality, he may well hesitate to let them 
remain comparatively ignorant in order to im- 
press upon them this dodrine. In this age, when 
so much stress is laid on the importance of giving 
one's children the best education possible, it seems 
too large a price to pay. Why, after all, should 
a citizen send his boys to a school provided by 
the State, if better schools exist in the neighbor- 
hood which he can afford to have them attend '^. 

This convidion on the part of parents is cer- 
tainly justified in many se6lions of the country, 
and when justifiable, disarms the critic who is 

[ I02 ] 



Education 



prepared to take a father to task for sending his 
children to a private school. Also, it is the only 
argument which the well-to-do aristocrat can suc- 
cessfully pro ted himself behind. It is a full suit 
of armor in itself, but it is all he has. Every other 
excuse which he can give is flimsy as tissue-paper, 
and exposes him utterly. Therefore, if the State 
is desirous to educate the sons of its leading citi- 
zens, it ought to make sure that the public schools 
are second to none in the land. If it does not, it 
has only itself to blame if they are educated apart 
from the sons of the masses of the population. 
Nor is it an answer to quote the Fourth of July 
orator, that our public schools are second to none 
in the world ; for one has only to investigate to 
be convinced that, both as regards the methods 
of teaching and as regards ventilation, many of 
them all over the country are signally inferior to 
the school as it should be, and the school, both 
public and private, as it is in certain localities. 
So long as school boards and committees, from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific, are composed mainly 
of political aspirants without experience in educa- 
tional matters, and who seek to serve as a first or 
second step toward the White House, our public 
schools are likely to remain only pretty good. So 

[ 103 ] 



The Art of Living 

long as people with axes to grind, or, more plainly 
speaking, text-books to circulate, are chosen to 
office, our public schools are not likely to im- 
prove. So long — and here is the most serious 
fador of all — so long as the well-to-do American 
father and mother continue to be sublimely in- 
different to the condition of the public schools, 
the public schools will never be so good as they 
ought to be. 

It must certainly be a source of constant dis- 
couragement to the earnest-minded people in this 
country, who are interested in education, and are 
at the same time believers in our professed na- 
tional hostility to class distinctions, that the well- 
to-do American parent so calmly turns his back 
on the public schools, and regards them very 
much from the lofty standpoint from which cer- 
tain persons are wont to regard religion — as an 
excellent thing for the masses, but superfluous for 
themselves. Of course, if we are going, in this re- 
sped: also, to model ourselves on and imitate the 
older civilizations, there is nothing to be said. If 
the public schools are to be merely a semi-chari- 
table institution for children whose parents can- 
not afford to separate them from the common 
herd, the discussion ceases. But what becomes, 

[ 104 ] 



Education 



then, of our cherished and Fourth of July sanc- 
tified theories of equality and common school 
education ? And what do we mean when we prate 
of a common humanity, and no upper class ? 

It is in the city or town, where the public 
school is equal or superior to the private school, 
that the real test comes. Yet in these places well- 
to-do parents seem almost as indifferent as when 
they have the righteous defence that their chil- 
dren would be imperfedly educated, or breathe 
foul air, were they to be sent to a public school. 
They take no interest, and they fairly bristle 
with polite and ingenious excuses for evading 
compliance with the institutions of their country. 
This is true, probably, of three-fifths of those 
parents, who can afford, if necessary, to pay for 
private instru6tion. And having once made the 
decision that, for some reason, a public school 
education is not desirable for their children, they 
feel absolved from further responsibility and 
pradlically wash their hands of the matter. It is 
notorious that a very large proportion of the 
children of the leading bankers, merchants, pro- 
fessional men, and other influential citizens, who 
reside in the so-called court end of our large 
cities, do not attend the public schools, and it is 



The Art of Living 

equally notorious that the existence of a well- 
conduded and satisfadtory school in the district 
affeds the attendance comparatively little. If 
only this element of the population, which is 
now so indifferent, would interest itself adively, 
what a vast improvement could be effected in 
our public school system! If the parents in the 
community, whose standards of life are the high- 
est, and whose ideas are the most enlightened, 
would as a class co-operate in the advancement 
of common education, the charge that our public 
schools produce on the whole second-rate ac- 
quirements, and second-rate morals and manners, 
would soon be refuted, and the cause of popular 
education would cease to be handicapped, as it is 
at present, by the coolness of the well-to-do class. 
If the public schools, in those sedlions of our 
cities where our most intelligent and influential 
citizens have their homes, are unsatisfactory, 
they could speedily be made as good as any pri- 
vate school, were the same interest manifested 
by the tax-payers as is shown when an undesir- 
able pavement is laid, or a company threatens to 
provide rapid transit before their doors. Unfor- 
tunately, that same spirit of aloofness, which has 
in the past operated largely to exclude this ele- 

[ io6 ] 



Education 



ment in the nation from participation in the af- 
fairs of popular government, seems to be at the 
bottom of this matter. Certainly much progress 
has been made in the last twenty years in reme- 
dying the political evil, and the public good ap- 
pears to demand a change of front from the same 
class of people on the subjed: of common educa- 
tion, unless we are prepared to advocate the ex- 
istence and growth of a favored, special class, out 
of touch with, and at heart disdainful of, the 
average citizen. 

The most serious enemies of the public schools 
among well-to-do people appear to be women. 
Many a man, alive to the importance of educat- 
ing his sons in conformity with the spirit of our 
Constitution, would like to send his boys to a 
public school, but is deterred by his wife. A 
mother accustomed to the refinements of modern 
civilization is apt to shrink from sending her 
fleckless darling to consort, and possibly become 
the boon companion or bosom friend, of a street 
waif. 

She urges the danger of contamination, both 
physical and moral, and is only too glad to dis- 
cover an excuse for refusing to yield. "Would 
you like to have your precious boy sit side by 

[ 107 J 



The Art of Living 

side with a little negro ?'* I was asked one day, 
in horrified accents, by a well-to-do American 
mother; and I have heard many fears expressed 
by others that their offspring would learn vice, 
or contrad: disease, through daily association 
with the children of the mass. It is not unjust to 
state that the average well-to-do mother is grati- 
fied when the public school, to which her sons 
would otherwise be sent, is so unsatisfactory that 
their father*s patriotism is overborne by other 
considerations. All theories of government or hu- 
manity are lost sight of in her desire to shelter 
her boys, and the simplest way to her seems to 
be to set them apart from the rest of creation, in- 
stead of taking pains to make sure that they are 
suitably taught and protected side by side with 
the other children of the community. 

Excellent as many of our private schools are, 
it is doubtful if either the morals are better, or 
the liability to disease is less, among the children 
who attend them than at a public school of the 
best class. To begin with, the private schools in 
our cities are eagerly patronized by that not in- 
considerable class of parents who hope or ima- 
gine that the social position of their children is to 
be established by association with the children of 

[ io8 ] 



Education 



influential people. Falsehood, meanness, and un- 
worthy ambitions are quite as dangerous to char- 
ader, when the little man who suggests them has 
no patches on his breeches, as when he has, and 
unfortunately there are no outward signs on the 
moral nature, like holes in trousers, to serve as 
danger signals to our darlings. Then again, those 
of us who occupy comfortable houses in desir- 
able localities, will generally find on investigation 
that the average of the class of children which at- 
tend the public school in such a distrid is much 
superior to what paternal or maternal fancy has 
painted. In such a distrid the children of the 
ignorant emigrant class are not to be found in 
large numbers. The pupils consist mainly of the 
rank and file of the native American population, 
whose tendencies and capacities for good have 
always been, and continue to be, the basis of our 
strength as a people. There is no need that a 
mother with delicate sensibilities should send her 
son into the slums in order to obtain for him a 
common school education ; she has merely to con- 
sent that he take his chances with the rest of the 
children of the distridl in which he lives, and 
bend her own energies to make the standards of 
that school as high as possible. In that way she 

[ 109 ] 



The Art of Living 

will best help to raise the tone of the commu- 
nity as a whole, and best aid to obliterate those 
class distinctions which, in spite of Fourth of 
July negations, are beginning to expose us to the 
charge of insincerity. 

When a boy has reached the age of eleven or 
twelve, another consideration presents itself 
which is a source of serious perplexity to pa- 
rents. Shall he be educated at home — that is, at- 
tend school in his own city or town — or be sent 
to one of the boarding-schools or academies 
which are ready to open their doors to him and 
lit him for college ? Here again we are met by 
the suggestion that the boarding-school of this 
type is not a native growth, but an exotic. Eng- 
land has supplied us with a precedent. The great 
boarding-schools, Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, 
are the resort of the gentlemen of England. 
Though termed public schools, they are class 
schools, reserved and intended for the education 
of only the highly respectable. The sons of the 
butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker are not 
formally barred, but they are tacitly excluded. 
The pupils are the sons of the upper and well- 
to-do middle classes. A few boarding-schools for 
boys have been in existence here for many years, 

[ no] 



Education 

but In the last twenty there has been a notable 
increase in their number and importance. These, 
too, are essentially class schools, for though os- 
tensibly open to everybody, the charges for tui- 
tion and living are beyond the means of parents 
with a small income. Most of them are schools 
of a religious denomination, though commonly 
a belief in the creed for which the institution 
stands is not made a formal requisite for admis- 
sion. The most successful profess the Episco- 
palian faith, and in other essential respedls are 
modelled deliberately on the English public 
schools. 

The strongest argument for sending a boy to 
one of these schools is the fresh-air plea. Unde- 
niably, the growing boy in a large city is at a dis- 
advantage. He can rarely, if ever, obtain oppor- 
tunities for healthful exercise and recreation 
equal to those afforded by a well-condudled 
boarding-school. He is likely to become a little 
man too early, or else to sit in the house because 
there is nowhere to play. At a boarding-school 
he will, under firm but gentle discipline, keep 
regular hours, eat simple food, and between study 
times be stimulated to cultivate athletic or other 
outdoor pursuits. It is not strange that parents 

[ "I ] 



The Art of Living 

should be attracted by the comparison, and de- 
cide that, on the whole, their boys will fare better 
away from home. Obviously the aristocratic 
mother will point out to her husband that his 
predilection for the public school system is an- 
swered by the fa6l that the State does not supply 
schools away from the city, where abundant fresh 
air and a famous foot-ball field are appurtenant 
to the institution. Tom Brown at Rugby recurs 
to them both, and they conclude that what has 
been good enough for generations of English 
boys will be best for their own son and heir. 

On the other hand, have we Americans ever 
quite reconciled ourselves to, and sympathized 
with, the traditional attitude of English parents 
toward their sons as portrayed in veracious fic- 
tion ? The day of parting comes; the mother, 
red-eyed from secret weeping, tries not to break 
down; the blubbering sisters throw their arms 
around the neck of the hero of the hour, and slip 
pen-wipers of their own precious making into 
his pockets; the father, abnormally stern to hide 
his emotion, says, bluffly, "Good-by, Tom; it 's 
time to be oflF, and we '11 see you again at Christ- 
mas." And out goes Tom, a tender fledgeling, 
into the great world of the public school, and 

[ 112] 



Education 



that is the last of home. His holidays arrive, but 
there is no more weeping. He is pradically out 
of his parents' lives, and the sweet influence of 
a good mother is exercised only through fairly 
regular correspondence. And Tom is said to be 
getting manly, and that the nonsense has nearly 
been knocked out of him. He has been bullied 
and has learned to bully; he has been a fag and 
is now a cock. Perhaps he is first scholar, if not 
a hero of the cricket or foot-ball field. Then off 
he goes to college, half a stranger to those who 
love him best. 

This is fine and manly perhaps, in the Anglo- 
Saxon sense, but does it not seem just a little 
brutal ? Are we well-to-do Americans prepared 
to give up to others, however exemplary, the con- 
dud: of our children's lives ? Granting that the 
American private boarding-school is a delightful 
institution, where bullying and fags and cocks are 
not known, can it ever take the place of home, or 
supply the stimulus to individual life which is 
exercised by wise parental love and precept ? Of 
course, it is easier, in a certain sense, to send one's 
boy to a seled: boarding-school, where the con- 
ditions are known to be highly satisfadlory. It 
shifts the responsibility on to other shoulders, 

[ 113 ] 



The Art of Living 

and yet leaves one who is not sensitive, in the 
pleasing frame of mind that the very best thing 
has been done for the young idea. In our busy 
American life — more feverish than that of our 
English kinsfolk whose institution we have copied 
— many doubtless are induced to seek this solu- 
tion of a perplexing problem by the consciousness 
of their own lack of efficiency, and their own lack 
of leisure to provide a continuous home influence 
superior or equal to what can be supplied by head- 
masters and their assistants, who are both church- 
men and athletes. Many, too, especially fathers, 
are firm believers in that other English dodrine, 
that most boys need to have the nonsense knocked 
out of them, and that the best means of accom- 
plishing this result is to cut them loose from their 
mothers' apron-strings. 

It is to be borne in mind in this connexion 
that the great English public schools are a na- 
tional cult. That is, everybody above a certain 
class sends his sons to one of them. On the other 
hand, the private boarding-schools on this side 
of the water, fashioned after them, have thus far 
attracted the patronage of a very small element 
of the population. It is their misfortune, rather 
than their fault, that they are chiefly the resort 

[ "4] 



Education 



of the sons of rich or fashionable people, and 
consequently are the most conspicuously class 
schools in the country. Doubtless the earnest 
men who condud: most of them regret that this 
is so, but it is one of the fadtors of the case which 
the American parent with sons must face at pre- 
sent. It may be that this is to be the type of 
school which is to become predominant here, and 
that, as in England, the nation will recognize it 
as a national force, even though here, as there, 
only the sons of the upper classes enjoy its ad- 
vantages. That will depend partly on the extent 
to which we shall decide, as a society, to pro- 
mote further class education. At present these 
schools are essentially private institutions. They 
are small ; they do not, like our American col- 
leges, offer scholarships, and thus invite the at- 
tendance of ambitious students without means. 
Moreover, they are almost universally conduced 
on a sedarian basis, or with a sectarian leaning, 
which is apt to proselytize, at least indiredly. 

While those in charge of them indisputably 
strive to inculcate every virtue, the well-to-do 
American father must remember that his sons 
will associate intimately there with many boys 
whose parents belong to that frivolous class which 

[115] 



'The Art of Living 

is to-day chiefly absorbed in beautiful establish- 
ments, elaborate cookery, and the wholly mate- 
rial vanities of life, and are out of sympathy with, 
or are indiff^erent to, the earnest temper and views 
of that already large and intelligent portion of 
the community, which views with horror the de- 
velopment among us of an aristocracy of wealth, 
which apes and is striving to outdo the heartless 
inanities of the Old World. He must remember 
that a taste for luxury and sensuous, material 
aims, even though they be held in check by 
youthful devotion to the rites of the church, will 
prove no less disastrous, in the long run, to man- 
hood and patriotism, than the lack of fresh air 
or a famous foot-ball field. 

If, however, the American father chooses to 
keep his sons at home, he is bound to do all he 
can to overcome the physical disadvantages of 
city life. Fresh air and suitable exercise can be 
obtained in the suburbs of most cities by a little 
energy and co-operation on the part of parents. 
As an instance, in one or two of our leading cities, 
clubs of twelve to fifteen boys are sent out three 
or four afternoons a week under the charge of an 
older youth — usually a college or other student 
— who, without interfering with their liberty, su- 

[ "6] 



Education 



pervises their sports, and sees that they are well 
occupied. On days when the weather is unsuitable 
for any kind of game, he will take them to muse- 
ums, manufadtories, or other places of interest in 
the vicinity. In this way some of the watchful- 
ness and discipline which are constantly opera- 
tive at a boarding-school, are exercised without 
injury to home ties. There is no doubt that, un- 
less parents are vigilant and interest themselves 
unremittingly in providing necessary physical 
advantages, the boys in a crowded city are likely 
to be less healthy and vigorous in body, and per- 
haps in mind, than those educated at a first-class 
boarding-school. It may be, as our cities increase 
in size, and suburbs become more difficult of ac- 
cess, that the boarding-school will become more 
generally popular ; but there is reason to believe 
that, before it is recognized as a national institu- 
tion, sedarian religion will have ceased to control 
it, and it will be less imitative of England in its 
tone and social attitude. Until then, at least, many 
a parent will prefer to keep his boys at home. 



C 117] 



Education . 
II. 



^UPPOSING you had four daugh- 
ters, like Mr. Perkins, what would 
you do with them, educationally 
speaking ? " I said to my wife Bar- 
bara, by way of turning my attention to the 
other sex. 

" You mean what would they do with me ? 
They would drive me into my grave, I think," 
she answered. " Woman^s horizon has become 
so enlarged that no mother can tell what her 
next daughter may not wish to do. I understand, 
though, that you are referring simply to schools. 
To begin with, I take for granted you will agree 
that American parents, who insist on sending 
their boys to a public school, very often hesi- 
tate or decline point-blank to send their girls." 
" Precisely. And we are forthwith confronted 
by the question whether they are justified in so 
doing." 

Barbara looked meditative for a moment, then 
she said : " I am quite aware there is no logical 
reason why girls should not be treated in the same 
way, and yet as a matter of fad: I am not at all 

[ ii8 ] 



Education 

sure, patriotism and logic to the contrary not- 
withstanding, I should send a daughter to a pub- 
lic school unless I were convinced, from personal 
examination, that she would have neither a vul- 
gar teacher nor vulgar associates. Manners mean 
so much to a woman, and by manners I refer 
chiefly to those nice perceptions of everything 
which stamp a lady, and which you can no more 
describe than you can describe the perfume of 
the violet. The objedlion to the public schools 
for a girl is that the unwritten constitution of this 
country declared years ago that every woman was 
a born lady, and that manners and nice percep- 
tions were in the national blood, and required no 
cultivation for their production. Latterly, a good 
many people interested in educational matters 
have discovered the fallacy of this point of view; 
so that when the name of a woman to adl as the 
head of a college or other first-class institution 
for girls is brought forward to-day, the first ques- 
tion asked is, 'Is she a lady?' Ten years ago 
mental acquirements would have been regarded 
as sufficient, and the questioner silenced with the 
severe answer that every American woman is a 
lady. The public school authorities are still harp- 
ing too much on the original fallacy, or rather 

C "9 3 



The Art of Living 

the new point of view has not spread sufficiently 
to cause the average American school-teacher to 
suspedl that her manners might be improved and 
her sensibilities refined. There, that sounds like 
treason to the principles of democracy, yet you 
know I am at heart a patriot." 

"And yet to bring up boys on a common basis 
and separate the girls by class education seems 
like a contradi(!:tion of terms," I said. 

"I am confident — at least if we as a nation 
really do believe in obliterating class distinctions 
— that it won't be long before those who control 
the public schools recognize more universally the 
value of manners, and of the other traits which 
distinguish the woman of breeding from the wo- 
man who has none," said Barbara. "When that 
time comes the well-to-do American mother will 
have no more reason for not sending her daugh- 
ters to a public school than her sons. As it is, 
they should send them oftener than they do." 

"Of course," continued Barbara, presently, 
"the best private schools are in the East, and a 
very much larger percentage, both of girls and 
boys, attends the public schools in the West than 
in the East. Indeed, I am inclined to think that 
comparatively few people west of Chicago do not 

[ I20 ] 



Education 

send their children to public schools. But, on the 
other hand, there are boarding-schools for girls 
all over the East which are mainly supported by 
girls from the West, whose mothers wish to have 
them finished. They go to the public schools at 
home until they are thirteen or fourteen, and then 
are packed off to school for three or four years in 
order to teach them how to move, and wear their 
hair, and spell, and control their voices — for the 
proper modulation of the voice has at last been 
recognized as a necessary attribute of the well- 
bred American woman. As for the Eastern girl 
who is not sent to the public school, she usually 
attends a private day-school in her native city, the 
resources of which are supplemented by special 
instruction of various kinds, in order to produce 
the same finished specimen. But it is n't the fin- 
ished specimen who is really interesting from the 
educational point of view to-day; that is, the con- 
ventional, cosmopolitan, finished specimen such 
as is turned out with deportment and accomplish- 
ments from the hands of the English governess, 
the French Mother Superior, or the American 
private school-mistress. 

"After making due allowance for the national 
point of view, I don't see very much difference 

[ i^i ] 



The Art of Living 

in principle between the means adopted to finish 
the young lady of society here and elsewhere. 
There are thousands of daughters of well-to-do 
mothers in this country who are brought up on 
the old aristocratic theory that a woman should 
study moderately hard until she is eighteen, then 
look as pretty as she can, and devote herself un- 
til she is married to having what is called on this 
side of the Atlantic a good time. To be sure, in 
France the good time does not come until after 
marriage, and there are other differences, but the 
well-bred lady of social graces is the well-bred 
lady, whether it be in London, Paris, Vienna, or 
New York, and a ball-room in one capital is es- 
sentially the same as in all the others, unless it 
be that over here the very young people are al- 
lowed to crowd out everybody else. There are 
thousands of mothers who are content that this 
should be the limit of their daughter's experi- 
ence, a reasonably good education and perfect 
manners, four years of whirl, and then a husband, 
or no husband and a conservative afternoon tea- 
drinking spinsterhood — and they are thankful 
on the whole when their girls put their necks 
meekly beneath the yoke of convention and do 
as past generations of women all over the civi- 

[ 122 ] 



Education 

lized world have done. For the reign of the un- 
conventional society young woman is over. She 
shocks now her own countrywoman even more 
than foreigners ; and though, like the buffalo, she 
is still extant, she is disappearing even more rap- 
idly than that illustrious quadruped." 

"Are you not wandering slightly from the 
topic?" I ventured to inquire. 

"Not at all," said Barbara. "I was stating 
merely that the Old-World, New-World young 
lady, with all her originality and piquancy, how- 
ever charming, and however delightfully inevita- 
ble she may be, is not interesting from the edu- 
cational point of view. Or rather I will put it in 
this way; the thoughtful, well-to-do American 
mother is wondering hard whether she has a 
right to be content with the ancient programme 
for her daughters, and is watching with eager in- 
terest the experiments which some of her neigh- 
bors are trying with theirs. We cannot claim as 
an exclusive national invention collegiate edu- 
cation for women, and there 's no doubt that my 
sex in England is no less completely on the war- 
path than the female world here; but is there a 
question that the peculiar qualities of American 
womanhood are largely responsible for the awak- 

[ 123 ] 



The Art of Living 

ening wherever it has taken place ? My dear, you 
asked me just now what a man like Mr. Perkins 
should do with his four daughters. Probably 
Mrs. Perkins is trying to make up her mind 
whether she ought to send them to college. Very 
likely she is arguing with Mr. Perkins as to 
whether, all things considered, it would n't be 
advisable to have one or two of them study a 
profession, or learn to do something bread-win- 
ning, so that in case he, poor man — for he does 
look overworked — should not succeed in leav- 
ing them the five thousand dollars a year he 
hopes, they need not swell the category of the 
decayed gentlewoman of the day. I dare say they 
discuss the subjed: assiduously, in spite of the 
views Mr. Perkins has expressed to you regard- 
ing the sacredness of unemployed feminine gen- 
tility; for it costs so much to live that he can't 
lay up a great deal, and there are certainly strong 
arguments in favor of giving such girls the op- 
portunity to make the most of themselves, or 
at least to look at life from the self-supporting 
point of view. At first, of course, the students 
at the colleges for women were chiefly girls who 
hoped to utilize, as workers in various lines, the 
higher knowledge they acquired there; but every 

[ 1^4 ] 



Education 

year sees more and more girls, who exped: to be 
married sooner or later — the daughters of law- 
yers, physicians, merchants — apply for admis- 
sion, on the theory that what is requisite for a 
man is none too good for them; and it is the ex- 
ample of these girls which is agitating the seren- 
ity of so many mothers, and suggesting to so 
many daughters the idea of doing likewise. Even 
the ranks of the most fashionable are being in- 
vaded, though undeniably it is still the fashion 
to stay at home, and I am inclined to think that 
it is only the lack of the seal of fashion that re- 
strains many conservative people, like the Per- 
kinses, from educating their daughters as though 
they probably would not be married, instead of 
as though they were almost certain to be/' 

" You may remember that Perkins assured me 
not long ago, that marriage did not run in the 
Perkins female line," said I. 

" All the more reason, then, that his girls should 
be encouraged to equip themselves thoroughly in 
some direction or other, instead of waiting dis- 
consolately to be chosen in marriage, keeping up 
their courage as the years slip away, with a few 
cold drops of Associated Charity. Of course the 
majority of us will continue to be wives and 

[ 125] 



The Art of Living 

mothers — there is nothing equal to that when 
it is a success — but will not marriage become 
still more desirable if the choicest girls are edu- 
cated to be the intelledual companions of men, 
and taught to familiarize themselves with the real 
conditions of life, instead of being limited to the 
rose garden of a harem, over the hedges of which 
they are expeded only to peep at the busy world 
— the world of men, the world of adion and toil 
and struggle and sin — the world into which 
their sons are graduated when cut loose from the 
maternal apron-strings ? We intend to learn 
what to teach our sons, so that we may no longer 
be silenced with the plea that women do not 
know, and be put off with a secretive conjugal 
smile. And as for the girls who do not marry, 
the world is open to them — the world of art and 
song and charity and healing and brave endea- 
vor in a hundred fields. Become just like men ? 
Never. If there is one thing which the educated 
woman of the present is seeking to preserve and 
foster, it is the subtle delicacy of nature, it is the 
engaging charm of womanhood which distin- 
guishes us from men. Who are the pupils at the 
colleges for women to-day ? The dowdy, sexless, 
unattradive, masculine-minded beings who have 

[ 1^6 ] 



Education 



served to typify for nine men out of ten the 
crowning joke of the age — the emancipation of 
women ? No; but lovely, graceful, sympathetic, 
earnest, pure-minded girls in the flower of at- 
tradive maidenhood. And that is why the well- 
to-do American mother is asking herself whether 
she would be doing the best thing for her daugh- 
ter if she were to encourage her to become merely 
a New-World, Old-World young lady of the an- 
cient order of things. For centuries the women 
of civilization have worshipped chastity, suffer- 
ing resignation and elegance as the ideals of femi- 
ninity; now we mean to be intelligent besides, or 
at least as nearly so as possible." 

" In truth a philippic, Barbara," I said. " It 
would seem as though Mrs. Grundy would not 
be able to hold out much longer. Will you tell 
me, by the way, what you women intend to do 
after you are fully emancipated ? " 

" One thing at a time," she answered. " We 
have been talking of education, and I have simply 
been suggesting that no conscientious mother can 
afford to ignore or pass by with scorn the claims 
of higher education for girls — experimental and 
faulty as many of the present methods to attain 
it doubtless are. As to what women are going to 

[ 127 ] 



The Art of Living 

do when our preliminary perplexities are solved 
and our sails are set before a favorable wind, I 
have my ideas on that score also, and some day 
I will discuss them with you. But just now I 
should like you to answer me a question. What 
are the best occupations for sons to follow when 
they have left school or college ? " 

Pertinent and interesting as was this inquiry 
of Barbara's, I felt the necessity of drawing a 
long breath before I answered it. 



[ 128 ] 



Occ up at ion , 
I. 



HE American young man, in the 

T 0-5^0 sele6lion of a vocation, is prac- 
^^ tically cut off from two callings 
which are dear to his contempora- 
ries in other civilized countries 
— the Army and the Navy. The possibility of war, 
with all its horrors and its opportunities for per- 
sonal renown, is always looming up before the 
English, French, German, or Russian youth, 
who is well content to live a life of gilded martial 
inactivity in the hope of sooner or later winning 
the cross for conspicuous service, if he escapes a 
soldier's grave. We have endured one war, and 
we profoundly hope never to undergo another. 
Those of us who are ethically opposed to the 
slaughter of thousands of human beings in a 
single day by cannon, feel that we have geogra- 
phy on our side. Even the bloodthirsty are forced 
to acknowledge that the prospers here for a gen- 
uine contest of any kind are not favorable. Con- 
sequently, the ardor of the son and heir, who 
would like to be a great soldier or a sea captain, 
is very apt to be cooled by the representation 

[ 129 ] 



The Art of Living 

that his days would be spent in watching Indians 
or cattle thieves on the Western plains, or in 
cruising uneventfully in the Mediterranean or 
the Gulf of Mexico. At all events our standing, 
or, more accurately speaking, sitting Army, and 
our Navy are so small, that the demand for gen- 
erals and captains is very limited. Therefore, 
though we commend to our sons the prowess of 
Caesar, Napoleon, Nelson, Von Moltke, and 
Grant, we are able to demonstrate to them, 
even without recourse to modern ethical ar- 
guments, that the opportunities for distindion 
on this side of the water are likely to be very 
meagre. 

Also, we Americans, unlike English parents, 
hesitate to hold out as offerings to the Church a 
younger son in every large family. We have no 
national Church ; moreover, the calling of a cler- 
gyman in this country lacks the social pidlur- 
esqueness which goes far, or did go far, to recon- 
cile the British younger son to accept the living 
which fell to his lot through family influence. 
Then again, would the American mother, like 
the conventional mother of the older civiliza- 
tions, as represented in biography and fidion, 
if asked which of all vocations she would prefer 

[130 ] 



Occupation 

to have her son adopt, reply promptly and fer- 
vidly, " the ministry ?" 

I put this question to my wife by way of ob- 
taining an answer. She reflected a moment, then 
she said, " If one of my boys really felt called 
to be a clergyman, I should be a very happy 
woman ; but I would n't on any account have 
one of them enter the ministry unless he did." 
This reply seems to me to express not merely 
the attitude of the American mother, but also 
the point of view from which the American 
young man of to-day is apt to look at the ques- 
tion. He no longer regards the ministry as a pro- 
fession which he is free to prefer, merely because 
he needs to earn his daily bread; and he under- 
stands, when he becomes a clergyman, that luke- 
warm or merely conventional service will be ut- 
terly worthless in a community which is thirsty 
for inspirational suggestion, but which is soul-, 
sick of cant and the perfervid reiteration of out- 
worn delusions. The consciousness that he has 
no closer insight into the mysteries of the uni- 
verse than his fellow-men, and the fear that he 
may be able to solace their doubts only by skil- 
ful concealment of his own, is tending, here and 
all over the civilized world, to deter many a 

[ 131 ] 



The Art of Living 

young man from embracing that profession, 
which once seemed to offer a safe and legitimate 
niche for any pious youth who was uncertain 
what he wished to do for a Hvlng. Happy he who 
feels so closely In touch with the Infinite that he 
is certain of his mission to his brother-man ! But 
is any one more out of place than the priest who 
seems to know no more than we do of what we 
desire to know most ? We demand that a poet 
should be heaven-born; why should we not re- 
quire equivalent evidence of fitness from our 
spiritual advisers ? 

And yet, on the other hand, when the con- 
vi6lIon of fitness or mission exists, what calling 
is there which offers to-day more opportunities 
for usefulness than the ministry ? The growing 
tendency of the Church is toward wider Issues 
and a broader scope. Clergymen are now encour- 
aged and expeded to aid In the solution of pro- 
blems of living no less than those of dying,and to 
lead In the discussion of matters regarding which 
they could not have ventured to express opin- 
ions fifty years ago without exposing themselves 
to the charge of being meddlesome or unclerical. 
The whole field of pradlcal charity, economics, 
hygiene, and the relations of human beings to 

[ 132 ] 



Occupation 

each other on this earth, are fast becoming 
the legitimate domain of the Church, and 
the general interest in this new phase of use- 
fulness is serving to convince many of the 
clergy themselves that the existence of so 
many creeds, differing but slightly and unim- 
portantly from one another, is a waste of vital 
force and machinery. In this age of trusts, a 
trust of all religious denominations for the 
common good of humanity would be a mono- 
poly which could pay large dividends without 
fear of hostile legislation. 

In this matter of the choice of a vocation, the 
case of the ambitious, promising young man is 
the one which commends itself most to our sym- 
pathies ; and next to it stands that of the general 
utility man — the youth who has no definite 
tastes or talents, and who seleds his life occu- 
pation from considerations other than a con- 
sciousness of fitness or of natural inclination. 
There are here, as elsewhere, born merchants, 
lawyers, do6lors, clergymen, architedts, engineers, 
inventors, and poets, who promptly follow their 
natural bents without suggestion and in the teeth 
of difficulties. But the promising young man in 
search of a brilliant career, and the general utility 

[ ^Z?> ] 



The Art of Living 

man, are perhaps the best exponents of a nation's 
temper and inclination. 

In every civiHzation many promising youths 
and the general run of utility men are apt to turn 
to business, for trade seems to offer the largest 
return in the way of money with the least amount 
of special knowledge. In this new country of ours 
the number of young men who have selected a 
business career during the last fifty years, from 
personal inclination, has been very much greater 
than elsewhere, and the tone and temper of the 
community has swept the general utility man 
into mere money making almost as a matter of 
course. The reasons for this up to this time have 
been obvious: The resources and industries of a 
vast and comparatively sparsely settled continent 
have been developed in the last fifty years, and 
the great prizes in the shape of large fortunes re- 
sulting from the process have naturally capti- 
vated the imagination of ambitious youth. We 
have unjustly been styled a nation of shopkeep- 
ers; but it may in all fairness be alleged that, un- 
til the last fifteen years, we have been under the 
spell of the commercial and industrial spirit, and 
that the intelledual faculties of the nation have 
been mainly absorbed in the introduction and 

[ 134 ] 



Occupation 

maintenance of railroads and fa6tories,in the rais- 
ing and marketing of grain, in the development 
of real estate enterprises, and in trading in the 
commodities or securities which these various 
undertakings have produced. 

The resources of the country are by no means 
exhausted; there are doubtless more mines to 
open which will make their owners superbly rich; 
new discoveries in the mechanical or eledrical 
field will afford fresh opportunities to discerning 
men of means; and individual or combined capi- 
tal will continue to reap the reward of both le- 
gitimate and over-reaching commercial acumen. 
But it would seem as though the day of enor- 
mous fortunes, for men of average brains and 
luck, in this country were nearly over, and that 
the great pecuniary prizes of the business world 
would henceforth be gleaned only by extraor- 
dinary or exceptional individuals. The country 
is no longer sparsely settled; fierce competition 
speedily cuts the abnormal profit out of new en- 
terprises which are not protected by a patent; 
and in order to be conspicuously successful in 
any branch of trade, one will have more and more 
need of unusual ability and untiring application. 

In other words, though ours is still a new 

[ 135] 



The Art of Living 

country, it will not be very long before the op- 
portunities and conditions of a business life re- 
semble closely those which confront young men 
elsewhere. As in every civilized country, trade 
in some form will necessarily engage the atten- 
tion of a large portion of the population. From 
physical causes, a vast majority of the citizens 
of the United States must continue to derive 
their support from agriculture and the callings 
which large crops of cereals, cotton, and sugar 
make occasion for. Consequently business will 
always furnish occupation for a vast army of 
young men in every generation, and few suc- 
cesses will seem more enviable than those of the 
powerful and scrupulous banker, or the broad- 
minded and capable railroad president. But, on 
the other hand, will the well-to-do American 
father and mother, eager to see their promising 
sons make the most of themselves, continue to 
advise them to go into business in preference to 
other callings ? And will the general utility man 
still be encouraged to regard some form of trade 
as the most promising outlook, for one who 
does not know what he wishes to do, to adopt ? 
He who hopes to become a great banker or 
illustrious railway man, must remember that the 

[ 136 ] 



Occupation 

streets of all our large cities teem with young 
men whose breasts harbor similar ambitions. 

Doubtless, it was the expedation of our fore- 
fathers that our American civilization would add 
new occupations to the callings inherited from 
the old world, which would be alluring both to 
the promising young man and the youth without 
predilections, and no less valuable to society and 
elevating to the individual than the best of those 
by which men have earned their daily bread since 
civilization first was. As a matter of fad:, we 
Americans have added just one, that of the mod- 
ern stock-broker. To be sure, I am not includ- 
ing the ranchman. It did seem at one time as 
though we were going to add another in him — 
a sort of gentleman shepherd. But be it that the 
cattle have become too scarce or too numerous, 
be it that the demon of competition has planted 
his hoofs on the farthest prairie, one by one the 
brave youths who went West in search of for- 
tune, have returned East for the last time, and 
abandoned the field to the cowboys and the na- 
tive settler. The pioneers in this form of occu- 
pation made snug fortunes, but after them came 
a deluge of promising or unpromising youths 
who branded every animal within a radius of 

[ 137 ] 



The Art of Living 

hundreds of miles with a letter of the alphabet. 
Their only living monument is the polo pony. 
Our single and signal contribution to the call- 
ings of the world has been the apotheosis of the 
stock-broker. For the last twenty-five years, the 
well-to-do father and mother and their sons, in 
our large cities, have been under the spell of a 
craze for the brokerage business. The conscious- 
ness that the refinements of modern living can- 
not adequately be supplied in a large city to a 
family whose income does not approximate ten 
thousand dollars a year, is a cogent argument in 
favor of trying to grow rich rapidly, and both 
the promising young man and the general utility 
man welcomed the new calling with open arms. 
Impelled by the notion that here was a vocation 
which required no special knowledge or attain- 
ments, and very little capital, which was plea- 
sant, gentlemanly, and not unduly confining, and 
which promised large returns almost in the 
twinkling of an eye, hundreds and thousands 
of young men became brokers — chiefly stock- 
brokers, but also cotton-brokers, note-brokers, 
real -estate -brokers, insurance -brokers, and 
brokers in nearly everything. The field was 
undoubtedly a rich one for those who first en- 

[ 138 ] 



Occupation 

tered it. There was a need for the broker, and 
he was speedily recognized as a valuable addition 
to the machinery of trade. Many huge fortunes 
were made, and we have learned to associate the 
word broker with the possession of large means, 
an imposing house on a fashionable street, and 
diverse docked and stylish horses. 

Of course, the king of all brokers has been the 
stock-broker, for to him was given the oppor- 
tunity to buy and sell securities on his own ac- 
count, though he held himself out to his cus- 
tomers as merely a poor thing who worked for 
a commission. No wonder that the young man, 
just out of college, listened open-mouthed to the 
tales of how many thousands of dollars a year 
so and so, who had been graduated only five 
years before, was making, and resolved to try his 
luck with the same Aladdin's lamp. Nor was it 
strange that the sight of men scarcely out of 
their teens, driving down town in fur coats, in 
their own equipages, with the benison of suc- 
cessful capitalists in their salutations, settled the 
question of choice for the youth who was wa- 
vering or did not know what he wished to do. 

It is scarcely an extreme statement that the so- 
called aristocracy of our principal cities to-day is 

[ 139 ] 



"The Art of Living 

largely made up of men who are, or once were, 
stock-brokers, or who have made their millions 
by some of the forms of gambling which our 
easy-going euphemism styles modern commer- 
cial aggressiveness. Certainly, a very considera- 
ble number of our most splendid private resi- 
dences have been built out of the proceeds of 
successful ventures in the stock market, or the 
wheat pit, or by some other purely speculative 
operations. Many stars have shone brilliantly for 
a season, and then plunged precipitately from the 
zenith to the horizon; and much has been wisely 
said as to the dangers of speculation; but the fa6l 
remains that a great many vast fortunes owe their 
existence to the broker's office; fortunes which 
have been salted down, as the phrase is, and now 
furnish support and titillation for a leisurely, 
green old age, or enable the sons and daughters 
of the original maker to live in luxury. 

Whatever the American mother may feel as to 
her son becoming a clergyman, there is no doubt 
that many a mother to-day would say "God 
grant that no son of mine become a stock- 
broker." I know stock-brokers — many indeed 
— who are whole-souled, noble-natured men, 
free from undue worldliness, and with refined 

[ 140 ] 



Occupation 

instindls. But the stock-broker, as he exists in 
the every-day life of our community, typifies 
signally the gambler's yearning to gain wealth 
by short cuts, and the monomania which regards 
as pitiable those who do not possess and display 
the gewgaws of feverish, fashionable materialism. 
There are stock-brokers in all the great capitals 
of the world, but nowhere has the vocation swal- 
lowed up the sons of the best people to the ex- 
tent that it has done here during the last thirty 
years. And yet, apart from the opportunity it 
affords to grow rich rapidly, what one good rea- 
son is there why a promising young man should 
decide to buy and sell stocks for a living? In- 
deed, not merely decide, but seled:, that occupa- 
tion as the most desirable calling open to him ? 
Does it tend either to ennoble the nature or en- 
rich the mental faculties ? It is one of the formal 
occupations made necessary by the exigencies of 
the business world, and as such is legitimate and 
may be highly respedtable; but surely it does 
not, from the nature of the services required, 
deserve to rank high; and really there would 
seem to be almost as much occasion for confer- 
ring the accolade of social distinction on a dealer 
in excellent fish as on a successful stock-broker. 

[ HI ] 



The Art of Living 

However, alas ! it is easy enough to assign the 
reason why the business has been so popular. It 
appears that, even under the flag of our aspiring 
nationality, human nature is still so weak that 
the opportunity to grow rich quickly, when pre- 
sented, is apt to over-ride all noble considerations. 
Foreign censors have ventured not infrequently 
to declare that there was never yet a race so hun- 
gry for money as we free-born Americans; and 
not even the pious ejaculation of one of our 
United States Senators, "What have we to do 
with abroad ?" is conclusive proof that the accu- 
sation is not well founded. In fa6t there seems 
to be ample proof that we, who sneered so aus- 
terely at the Faubourg St. Germain and the aris- 
tocracies of the Old World, and made Fourth 
of July protestations of poverty and chastity, 
have fallen down and worshipped the golden calf 
merely because it was made of gold. Because it 
seemed to be easier to make money as stock- 
brokers than in any other way, men have has- 
tened to become stock-brokers. To be sure it 
may be answered that this is only human nature 
and the way of the world. True, perhaps; except 
that we started on the assumption that we were 
going to improve on the rest of the world, and 

[ 142 ] 



Occupation 

that its human nature was not to be our human 
nature. Would not the Faubourg St. Germain 
be preferable to an aristocracy of stock-brokers ? 
At all events, the law of supply and demand 
is beginning to redeem the situation, and, if not 
to restore our moral credit, at least to save the ris- 
ing generation from falling into the same slough. 
The stock-broker industry has been overstocked, 
and the late young capitalists in fur overcoats, 
with benedidory manners, wear anxious counte- 
nances under the stress of that Old World de- 
mon, excessive competition. Youth can no longer 
wake up in the morning and find itself the pro- 
prietor of a rattling business justifying a steam- 
yacht and a four-in-hand. The good old days 
have gone forever, and there is weeping and 
gnashing of teeth where of late there was joy 
and much accumulation. There is not business 
enough for all the promising young men who 
are stock-brokers already, and the youth of pro- 
mise must turn elsewhere. 



[ H3] 



Occ up at ion . 
II. 



*UT though the occupation of broker 
"p ^^? ^^^ become less tempting, the pro- 
mising youth has not ceased to look 
askance at any calling which does not 
seem to foreshadow a fortune in a short time. 
He is only just beginning to appreciate that we 
are getting down to hard pan, so to speak, and 
are nearly on a level, as regards the hardships of 
individual progress, with our old friends the effete 
civilizations. He finds it difficult to rid himself 
of the " Arabian Nights' " notion that he has 
merely to clap his hands to change ten dollars 
into a thousand in a single year, and to trans- 
form his bachelor apartments into a palace beau- 
tiful, with a wife, yacht, and horses, before he is 
thirty-five. He shrinks from the idea of being 
obliged to take seriously into account anything 
less than a hundred-dollar bill, and of earning a 
livelihood by slow yet persistent acceptance of 
tens and fives. His present ruling ambition is to 
be a promoter; that is, to be an organizer of 
schemes, and to let others do the real work and 
attend to the disgusting details. There are a great 

[ H4 ] 



Occupation 

many gentry of this kind in the field just at pre- 
sent. Among them is, or rather was, Lewis Pell, 
as I will call him for the occasion. I don't know 
exa6lly what he is doing now. But he was, until 
lately, a promoter. 

A handsome fellow was Lewis Pell. Tall, gen- 
tlemanly, and athletic-looking, with a gracious, 
imposing presence and manner, which made his 
rather commonplace conversation seem almost 
wisdom. He went into a broker's office after leav- 
ing college, like many other promising young 
men of his time, but he was clever enough either 
to realize that he was a little late, or that the pro- 
moter business offered a more promising scope 
for his genius, for he soon disappeared from the 
purlieus of the Stock Exchange, and the next 
thing we heard of him was as the tenant of an 
exceedingly elaborate set of offices on the third 
floor of a most expensive modern monster build- 
ing. Shortly after I read in the financial columns 
of the daily press that Mr. Lewis Pell had sold 
to a syndicate of bankers the first mortgage and 
the debenture bonds of the Light and Power 
Tradlion Company, an eledlrical corporation or- 
ganized under the laws of the State of New Jer- 
sey. Thirty days later I saw again that he had 

[ 145] 



The Art of Living 

sailed for Europe in order to interest London 
capital in a large enterprise, the nature of which 
was still withheld from the public. 

During the next two or three years I ran across 
Pell on several occasions. He seemed always to 
be living at the highest pressure, but the bril- 
liancy of his career had not impaired his good 
manners or attradiveness. I refer to his career 
as brilliant at this time because both his opera- 
tions and the consequent style of living which 
he pursued, as described by him on two different 
evenings when I dined with him, seemed to me in 
my capacity of ordinary citizen to savor of the 
marvellous, if not the supernatural. He frankly 
gave me to understand that it seemed to him a 
waste of time for an ambitious man to pay atten- 
tion to details, and that his business was to origi- 
nate vast undertakings, made possible only by 
large combinations of corporate or private capital. 
The word combination, which was frequently on 
his lips, seemed to be the corner-stone of his sys- 
tem. I gathered that the part which he sought to 
play in the battle of life was to breathe the breath, 
or the apparent breath, of existence into huge 
schemes, and after having given them a quick 
but comprehensive squeeze or two for his own 

[ 146 ] 



Occupation 

pecuniary benefit, to hand them over to syndi- 
cates, or other aggregations of capitalists, for the 
benefit of whom they might concern. He con- 
fided to me that he employed eleven typewriters ; 
that he had visited London seven, and Paris three 
times, in the last three years, on flying trips to 
accomplish brilliant deals ; that though his head- 
quarters were in New York, scarcely a week passed 
in which he was not obliged to run over to Chi- 
cago, Boston, Washington, Denver, Duluth, or 
Cincinnati, as the case might be. Without being 
boastful as to his profits, he did not hesitate to 
acknowledge to me that if he should do as well 
in the next three years as in the last, he would 
be able to retire from business with a million 
or so. 

Apart from this confession, his personal ex- 
travagance left no room for doubt that he must 
be very rich. Champagne flowed for him as Cro- 
ton or Cochituate for most of us, and it was evi- 
dent from his language that the hiring of special 
trains from time to time was a rather less serious 
matter than it would be for the ordinary citizen 
to take a cab. The account that he gave of three 
separate entertainments he had tendered to syn- 
dicates — of ten, twelve, and seventeen covers 

[ 147] 



The Art of Living 

respedively, at twenty dollars a cover — fairly 
made my mouth water and my eyes stick out, 
so that I felt constrained to murmur, "Your 
profits must certainly be very large, if you can 
afford that sort of thing.'* 

Pell smiled complacently and a little conde- 
scendingly. " I could tell you of things which I 
have done which would make that seem a baga- 
telle,'* he answered, with engaging mystery. 
Then after a moment's pause he said, "Do you 
know, my dear fellow, that when I was gradu- 
ated I came very near going into the office of a 
pious old uncle of mine who has been a commis- 
sion merchant all his life, and is as poor as Job's 
turkey in spite of it all — that is, poor as men are 
rated nowadays. He offered to take me as a clerk 
at one thousand dollars a year, with the promise 
of a partnership before I was bald-headed in case 
I did well. Supposing I had accepted his offer, 
where should I be to-day ? Grubbing at an of- 
fice-desk and earning barely enough for board 
and lodging. I remember my dear mother took 
it terribly to heart because I went into a broker's 
office instead. By the way, between ourselves, 
I 'm building a steam-yacht — nothing very won- 
derful, but a neat, comfortable craft — and I 'm 

[ 148 ] 



cc up at ion 

looking forward next summer to inviting my 
pious old uncle to cruise on her just to see him 
open his eyes.*' 

That was three years ago, and to-day I have 
every reason to believe that Lewis Pell is without 
a dollar in the world, or rather, that every dollar 
which he has belongs to his creditors. I had 
heard before his failure was announced that he 
was short of money, for the reason that several 
enterprises with which his name was conneded 
had been left on his hands — neither the syndi- 
cates nor the public would touch them — so his 
suspension was scarcely a surprise. He at present, 
poor fellow, is only one of an army of young 
men wandering dejectedly through the streets 
of New York or Chicago in these days of finan- 
cial depression, vainly seeking for something to 
promote. 

When the promising youth and the general 
utility man do get rid of the "Arabian Nights"* 
notion, and recognize that signal success here, in 
any form, is likely to become more and more 
difficult to attain, and will be the legitimate re- 
ward only of men of real might, of unusual abili- 
ties, originality, or dauntless industry, some of 
the callings which have fallen, as it were, into 

[ H9 ] 



The Art of Living 

disrepute through their lack of gambling facili- 
ties, are likely to loom up again socially. It may 
be, however, that modern business methods and 
devices have had the effed: of killing for all time 
that highly respectable pillar of society of fifty 
years ago, the old-fashioned merchant, who 
bought and sold on his own behalf, or on com- 
mission, real cargoes of merchandise, and real 
consignments of cotton, wheat, and corn. The 
telegraph and the warehouse certificate have 
worked such havoc that almost everything now 
is bought and sold over and over again before 
it is grown or manufactured, and by the time it 
is on the market there is not a shred of profit in 
it for anybody but the retail dealer. It remains 
to be seen whether, as the speculative spirit sub- 
sides, the merchant is going to reinstate himself 
and regain his former prestige. It may already 
be said that the promising youth does not re- 
gard him with quite so much contempt as he 
did. 

We have always professed in this country 
great theoretical resped: for the schoolmaster, 
but we have been careful, as the nation waxed in 
material prosperity, to keep his pay down and 
to shove him into the social background more 

C 150] 



Occupation 

and more. The promising youth could not af- 
ford to spend his manhood in this wise, and we 
have all really been too busy making money to 
think very much about those who are doing the 
teaching. Have we not always heard it stated that 
our schools and colleges are second to none in 
the world ? And if our schools, of course our 
schoolmasters. Therefore why bother our heads 
about them ? It is indeed wonderful, considering 
the little popular interest in the subjed: until 
lately, that our schoolmasters and our college 
professors are so competent as they are, and that 
the profession has flourished on the whole in 
spite of indifl^erence and superiority. How can 
men of the highest class be expeded to devote 
their lives to a profession which yields little more 
than a pittance when one is thoroughly success- 
ful ? And yet the education of our children ought 
to be one of our dearest concerns, and it is diffi- 
cult to see why the State is satisfied to pay the 
average instructor or instrudlress of youth about 
as much as the city laborer or a horse-car con- 
ductor receives. 

There are signs that those in charge of our 
large educational institutions all over the coun- 
try are beginning to recognize that ripe scholar- 

[ 151 ] 



"The Art of Livi77g 

ship and rare abilities as a teacher are entitled to 
be well recompensed pecuniarily, and that the 
breed of such men is likely to increase somewhat 
in proportion to the size and number of the 
prizes offered. Our college presidents and pro- 
fessors, those at the head of our large schools 
and seminaries, should receive such salaries as 
will enable them to live adequately. By this 
policy not only would our promising young men 
be encouraged to pursue learning, but those in 
the highest places would not be forced by po- 
verty to live in comparative retirement, but could 
become a(!;Hve social figures and leaders. In any 
profession or calling under present social condi- 
tions only those in the foremost rank can hope 
to earn more than a living, varying in quality 
according to the degree of success and the rank 
of the occupation; but it is to be hoped — and 
there seems some reason to believe — that the 
great rewards which come to those more able 
and industrious than their fellows will hence- 
forth, in the process of our national evolution, 
be more evenly distributed, and not confined so 
conspicuously to gambling, speculative, or com- 
mercial successes. The leaders in the great pro- 
fessions of law and medicine have for some time 

[ iS^- ] 



Occupation 

past declined to serve the free-born community 
without liberal compensation, and the same com- 
munityjwhich for half a century secretly believed 
that only a business man has the right to grow 
rich, has begun to recognize that there are even 
other things besides litigation and health which 
ought to come high. For instance, although the 
trained archite(^t still meets serious and depres- 
sing competition from those ready-made experi- 
menters in design who pronounce the first c in 
the word architect as though it were an J,the pub- 
lic is rapidly discovering that a man cannot build 
an attractive house without special knowledge. 
In the same class with the law, medicine, and 
architecture, and seemingly offering at present a 
greater scope for an ambitious young man, is en- 
gineering in all its branches. The furnaces, mines, 
manufactories, and the hydraulic, eleCtrical, or 
other plants connected with the numerous vast 
mechanical business enterprises of the country 
are furnishing immediate occupation for hun- 
dreds of graduates of the scientific or polytechnic 
schools at highly respeCtable salaries. This field 
of usefulness is certain for a long time to come to 
offer employment and a fair livelihood to many, 
and large returns to those who outstrip their con- 

[ 153 ] 



The Art of Living 

temporaries. More and more is the business man, 
the manufacturer, and the capitahst likely to be 
dependent for the economical or successful de- 
velopment and management of undertakings on 
the judgment of scientific experts in his own em- 
ployment or called in to advise, and it is only 
meet that the counsel given should be paid for 
handsomely. 

Those who pursue literature or art in their 
various branches in this country, and have ta- 
lents in some degree commensurate with their 
ambition, are now generally able to make a com- 
fortable livelihood. Indeed the men and women 
in the very front rank are beginning to receive 
incomes which would be highly satisfad:ory to a 
leading lawyer or physician. Of course original 
work in literature or art demands special ability 
and fitness, but the general utility man is begin- 
ning to have many opportunities presented to 
him in connexion with what may be called the 
clerical work of these professions. The great 
magazines and publishing houses have an in- 
creasing need for trained, scholarly men, for ca- 
pable critics, and discerning advisers in the field 
both of letter-press and illustration. Another 
calling which seems to promise great possibilities 

[ 154 3 



Occupation 

both of usefulness and income to those who de- 
vote themselves to it earnestly is the compara- 
tively new profession of journalism. The re- 
porter, with all his present horrors, is in the pro- 
cess of evolution; but the journalist is sure to 
remain the high-priest of democracy. His influ- 
ence is almost certain to increase materially, but 
it will not increase unless he seeks to lead public 
thought instead of bowing to it. The newspaper, 
in order to flourish, must be a moulder of opin- 
ion, and to accomplish this those who control its 
columns must more and more be men of educa- 
tion, force, and high ideals. Competition will 
winnow here as elsewhere, but those who by abil- 
ity and industry win the chief places will stand 
high in the community and command large pay 
for their services. 

An aristocracy of brains — that is to say, an 
aristocracy composed of individuals successful 
and prominent in their several callings — seems 
to be the logical sequence of our institutions un- 
der present social and industrial conditions. The 
only aristocracy which can exist in a democracy 
is one of honorable success evidenced by wealth 
or a handsome income, but the character of such 
an aristocracy will depend on the ambitions and 



The Art of Living 

tastes of the nation. The inevitable economic law 
of supply and demand governs here as elsewhere, 
and will govern until such a time as society may 
be reconstru(5led on an entirely new basis. Only 
the leaders in any vocation can hope to grow rich, 
but in proportion as the demands of the nation 
for what is best increase will the type and char- 
aderistics of these leaders improve. The doing 
away with inherited orders of nobility and delib- 
erate, patented class distinctions, gives the entire 
field to wealth. We boast proudly that no arti- 
ficial barriers confine individual social promo- 
tion ; but we must remember at the same time 
that those old barriers meant more than the per- 
petuation of perfumed ladies and idle gentlemen 
from century to century. We are too apt to for- 
get that the aristocracies of the old world signi- 
fied in the first place a process of seledion. The 
kings and the nobles, the lords and the barons, 
the knights who fought and the ladies for whom 
they died, were the master-spirits of their days 
and generations, the strong arms and the strong 
brains of civilized communities. They stood for 
force, the force of the individual who was more 
intelligent, more capable, and mightier in soul 
and body than his neighbors, and who claimed 

[ 156] 



Occupation 

the prerogatives of superiority on that account. 
These master-spirits, it is true, used these pre- 
rogatives in such a manner as to crystallize soci- 
ety into the classes and the masses, so hopelessly 
for the latter that the gulf between them still is 
wide as an ocean, notwithstanding that present 
nobilities have been shorn of their power so that 
they may be said to exist chiefly by sufferance. 
And yet the world is still the same in that there 
are men more intelligent, more capable, and 
mightier in soul and body than their fellows. 
The leaders of the past won their spurs by prow- 
ess with the battle-axe and spear, by wise coun- 
sel in aflfairs of state, by the sheer force of their 
superior manhood. The gentleman and lady 
stood for the best blood of the world, though 
they so often belied it by their adlions. 

We, who are accustomed to applaud our civil- 
ization as the hope of the world, may well look 
across the water and take suggestions from the 
institutions of Great Britain, not with the idea of 
imitation, but with a view to consider the forces 
at work there. For nearly a century now the go- 
vernment, though in form a monarchy, has been 
substantially a constitutional republic, imbued 
with inherited traditions and somewhat galvan- 

[ 157 ] 



The Art of Living 

ized by class distindtions, but nevertheless a con- 
stitutional republic. The nobility still exists as a 
sort of French roof or Eastern pagoda to give 
a pleasing appearance to the social edifice. The 
hereditary meaning of titles has been so largely 
negatived by the introduction of new blood — 
the blood of the strongest men of the period 
— that they have become, what they originally 
were, badges to distinguish the men most valu- 
able to the State. Their abolition is merely a 
question of time, and many of the leaders to 
whom they are proffered rejed: them as they 
would a cockade or a yellow satin waistcoat. On 
the other hand, and here is the point of argu- 
ment, the real aristocracy of England for the last 
hundred years has been an aristocracy of the 
foremost, ablest, and worthiest men of the na- 
tion, and with few exceptions the social and 
pecuniary rewards have been bestowed both by 
the State and by public appreciation on the mas- 
ter-spirits of the time in the best sense. Brilliant 
statesmanship, wisdom on the bench, the sur- 
geon's skill, the banker's sound discernment, 
genius in literature and art, when signally con- 
tributed by the individual, have won him fame 
and fortune. 

C 158] 



Occupation 

It may be said, perhaps, that the pecuniary 
rewards of science and literature have been less 
conspicuous than those accorded to other suc- 
cesses, but that has been due to the inherent 
practical temperament and artistic limitations of 
the Englishman, and can scarcely be an argu- 
ment against the contention that English society 
in the nineteenth century, with all its social idio- 
syncrasies, has really been graded on the order 
of merit. 

The tide of democracy has set in across the 
water and is running strongly, and there can be 
no doubt that the next century is likely to work 
great and strange changes in the conditions of 
society in England as well as here. The same 
questions pradically are presented to each nation, 
except that there a carefully construdled and in 
many respeds admirable system of society is to 
be disintegrated. We are a new country, and we 
have a right to be hopeful that we are sooner or 
later to outstrip all civilizations. Nor is it a blem- 
ish that the astonishing development of our ma- 
terial resources has absorbed the energies of our 
best blood. But it now remains to be seen whether 
the standards of pure democracy, without tradi- 
tions or barriers to point the way, are to justify 

[ 159 ] 



The Art of Living 

the experiment and improve the race. The char- 
ader of our aristocracy will depend on the vir- 
tues and tastes of the people, and the struggle 
is to be between aspiration and contentment with 
low ambitions. Our original undertaking has been 
made far more difficult by the infusion of the 
worst blood in Christendom, the lees of foreign 
nations; but the result of the experiment will be 
much more convincing because of this change in 
conditions. 

Who are to be the men of might and heroes 
of democracy ? That will depend on the demands 
and aspirations of the enfranchised people. With 
all its imperfedions, the civilization of the past 
has fostered the noble arts and stirred genius to 
immortalize itself in bronze and marble, in cathe- 
dral spires, in masterpieces of painting and litera- 
ture, in untiring scholarship, in fervent labors in 
law, medicine, and science. Democracy must care 
for these things, and encourage the individual to 
choose worthy occupations, or society will suffer. 
We hope and believe that, in the long run, the 
standards of humanity will be raised rather than 
lowered by the lifting of the flood-gates which 
divide the privileged classes from the mass; but 
it behooves us all to remember that while de- 

[ i6o] 



Occupation 

mand and supply must be the leading arbiters 
in the choice of a vocation, the responsibility of 
seledion is left to each individual. Only by the 
example of individuals will society be saved from 
accepting the low, vulgar aims and ambitions of 
the mass as a desirable weal, and this is the 
strongest argument against the do6lrines of those 
who would repress individuality for the alleged 
benefit of mankind as a whole. The past has 
given us many examples of the legislator who 
cannot be bribed, of the statesman faithful to 
principle, of the student who disdains to be su- 
perficial, of the gentleman who is noble in 
thought, and speech and adion, and they stand 
on the roll of the world's great men. Democracy 
cannot afford not to continue to add to this list, 
and either she must steel her countenance against 
the cheap man and his works, or sooner or later 
be confounded. Was Marie Antoinette a more 
dangerous enemy of the people than the news- 
paper proprietor who acquires fortune by cater- 
ing to the lowest tastes and prejudices of the 
public, or the self-made capitalist who argues 
that every man has his price, and seeks to ac- 
complish legislation by bribery ? 

[ i6i ] 



The Use of Time. 
L 



BROUGHT Rogers home with 

I®]! ^^^ again the other day. I do not 
^m. mean Rogers in the flesh; but 
"^ the example of Rogers as a bogy 
with which to confound my bet- 
ter half and myself. You may recall that Rogers 
is the bookkeeper for Patterson the banker, 
and that he has brought up and educated a 
family on a salary of twenty-two hundred dol- 
lars a year. 

"Barbara," said I, "we were reflecting yester- 
day that we never have time to do the things 
we really wish to do. Have you ever considered 
how Rogers spends his time?" 

My wife admitted that she had not, and she 
dutifully waited for me to proceed, though I 
could tell from the expression of her mouth that 
she did not expedt to derive much assistance 
from the example of Mr. Rogers. Therefore I 
made an interesting pathological dedud:ion to 
begin with. 

"Rogers does not live on his nerves from 
one year's end to the other, as we do." 

[ 162 ] 



"The Use of Ti 



me 



"I congratulate him," said Barbara, with a 
sigh. 

" And yet/' I continued, " he leads a highly 
respedlable and fairly interesting life. He gets up 
at precisely the same hour every morning, has 
his breakfast, reads the paper, and is at his desk 
pund:ually on time. He dines frugally, returns 
to his desk until half-past four or five, and after 
performing any errands which Mrs. Rogers has 
asked him to attend to, goes home to the bosom 
of his family. There he exchanges his coat and 
boots for a dressing-gown, or aged smoking- 
jacket, and slippers, and remains by his fireside 
absorbed in the evening paper until tea-time. 
Conversation with the members of his family 
beguiles him for half an hour after the comple- 
tion of the meal ; then he settles down to the 
family weekly magazine, or plays checkers or 
backgammon with his wife or daughters. After 
a while, if he is interested in ferns or grasses, he 
looks to see how his specimens are growing under 
the glass case in the corner. He pats the cat and 
makes sure that the canary is supplied with seed. 
Now and then he brings home a puzzle, like 
' Pigs in Clover,' which keeps him up half an 
hour later than usual, but ordinarily his head is 

[ '63 ] 



The Art of Living 

nodding before the stroke of ten warns him that 
his bed-hour has come. And just at the time 
that the wife of his employer, Patterson, may be 
setting out for a ball, he is tucking himself up 
in bed by the side of Mrs. Rogers. 

" Poor man ! " interjected Barbara. 

" He has his diversions," said I. " Now and 
again neighbors drop in for a chat, and the even- 
ing is wound up with a pitcher of lemonade and 
angel-cake. He and his wife drop in, in their 
turn, or he goes to a political caucus. Once a 
fortnight comes the church sociable, and every 
now and then a wedding. From time to time he 
and Mrs. Rogers attend ledlures. His young peo- 
ple entertain their friends, as the occasion offers, 
in a simple way, and on Sunday he goes to church 
in the morning and falls to sleep after a heavy 
dinner in the afternoon. He leads a quiet, peace- 
ful, conservative existence, unharassed by social 
functions and perpetual excitement." 

"And he prides himself, I dare say," said 
Barbara, "on the score of its virtuousness. He 
saves his nerves and he congratulates himself 
that he is not a society person, as he calls it. 
Your Mr. Rogers may be a very estimable in- 
dividual, dear, in his own sphere, and I do think 

[ 164] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



he manages wonderfully on his twenty-two hun- 
dred dollars a year; but I should prefer to see 
you lose your nerves and become a gibbering 
victim of nervous prostration rather than that 
you should imitate him." 

"I 'm not proposing to imitate him, Barbara/' 
I answered, gravely. "I admit that his life seems 
rather dull and not altogether inspiring, but I 
do think that a little of his repose would be 
beneficial to many of us whose interests are more 
varied. We might borrow it to advantage for a 
few months in the year, don't you think so ? I 
believe, Barbara, that if you and I were each of 
us to lie flat on our backs for one hour every 
day and think of nothing — and not even clinch 
our hands — we should succeed in doing more 
things than we really wish to do." 

"I suppose it's the climate — they say it's 
the climate," said Barbara, pensively. "Foreign- 
ers don't seem to be affeded in that way. They 're 
not always in a hurry as we are, and yet they 
seem to accomplish very nearly as much. We 
all know what it is to be conscious of that dread- 
ful, nervous, hurried feeling, even when we have 
plenty of time to do the things we have to do. 
I catch myself walking fast — racing, in fad: — 

[ 165] 



The Art of Living 

when there is not the least need of it. I don*t 
clinch my hands nearly so much as I used, and 
I Ve ceased to hold on to the pillow in bed as 
though it were a life-preserver, out of deference 
to Delsarte, but when it comes to lying down 
flat on my back for an hour a day — every day 
— really it is n't feasible. It 's an ideal plan, I 
dare say, but the days are not long enough. Just 
take to-day, for instance, and tell me, please, 
when I had time to lie down." 

"You are clinching your hands now/' I re- 
marked. 

"Because you have irritated me with your 
everlasting Mr. Rogers," retorted Barbara. She 
examined, nevertheless, somewhat dejedledly, 
the marks of her nails in her palms. "In the 
morning, for instance, when I came down to 
breakfast there was the mail. Two dinner invi- 
tations and an afternoon tea; two sets of wed- 
ding-cards, and a notice of a ledure by Miss 
Clara Hatheway on the relative condition of 
primary schools here and abroad; requests for 
subscriptions to the new Cancer Hospital and 
the Children's Fresh Air and Vacation Fund; 
an advertisement of an after-holiday sale of boys' 
and girls' clothes at Halliday's; a note from Mrs. 

[ i66 ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



James Green asking particulars regarding our 
last cook, and a letter from the President of my 
Woman's Club notifying me that I was exped:ed 
to talk to them at the next meeting on the ar- 
guments in favor of and against the ownership 
by cities and towns of gas and water-works. All 
these had to be answered, noted, or considered. 
Then I had to interview the cook and the 
butcher and the grocer about the dinner, give 
orders that a button should be sewn on one pair 
of your trousers and a stain removed from an- 
other, and give diredtions to the chore-man to 
oil the lock of the front-door, and tell him to go 
post-haste for the plumber to extra6l the blot- 
ting-paper which the children yesterday stuffed 
down the drain-pipe in the bath-tub, so that the 
water could not escape. Then I had to sit down 
and read the newspaper. Not because I had time, 
or wished to, but to make sure that there was 
nothing in it which you could accuse me of not 
having read. After this I dressed to go out. I 
stopped at the florist's to order some roses for 
Mrs. Julius Caesar, whose mother is dead; at 
Hapgood & Wales's and at Jones's for cotton- 
batting, hooks and eyes, and three yards of rib- 
bon; at Belcher's for an umbrella to replace 

[ 167] 



The Art of Living 

mine, which you left in the cable-cars, and at 
the library to seled: something to read. I arrived 
home breathless for the children's dinner, and 
immediately afterward I dressed and went to the 
meeting of the Executive Committee of the Wo- 
man's Club, stopping on the way to inquire if 
Mrs. Wilson's little boy were better. We started 
by discussing a proposed change in our Consti- 
tution regarding the number of black-balls ne- 
cessary to exclude a candidate, and drifted off on 
to 'Trilby.' It was nearly five when I got away, 
and as I felt it on my conscience to go both to 
Mrs. Southwick's and Mrs. Williams's teas, I 
made my appearance at each for a few minutes, 
but managed to slip away so as to be at home 
at six. When you came in I had just been read- 
ing to the children and showing them about their 
lessons. Now I have only just time to dress for 
dinner, for we dine at the Gregory Browns, at 
half-past seven. We ought to go later to the re- 
ception at Mrs. Hollis's — it is her last of three 
and we haven't been yet — but I suppose you 
will say you are too tired. There ! will you tell 
me when I could have found time to lie down 
for an hour to-day ?" 

I was constrained to laugh at my wife's reci- 
[ i68 ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



talj and I was not able at the moment to point 
out to her exadly what she might have omitted 
from her category so as to make room for the 
hour of repose. Nor, indeed, as I review the 
events of my own daily life and of the daily lives 
of my friends and acquaintances, am I able to 
define precisely where it could be brought in. 
And yet are we not — many of us who are in the 
thick of modern life — conscious that our days 
are, as it were, congested ? We feel sure that so 
far as our physical comfort is concerned we ought 
to be doing less, and we shrewdly susped: that, if 
we had more time in which to think, our spirit- 
ual natures would be the gainers. The difficulty 
is to stop, or rather to reduce the speed of mo- 
dern living to the point at which these high-pres- 
sure nervous symptoms disappear, and the days 
cease to seem too short for what we wish to 
accomplish. Perhaps those who take an intense 
interest in living will never be able to regain that 
delightful condition of equipoise, if it ever ex- 
isted, which our ancestors both here and across 
the water are said to have experienced. Perhaps, 
too, our ancestors were more in a hurry when 
they were alive than they seem to have been now 
that they are dead; but, whether this be true or 

[ 169] 



The Art of Living 

otherwise, we are confidently told by those who 
ought to know that we Americans of this day and 
generation are the most restless, nervous people 
under the sun, and live at a higher pressure than 
our contemporaries of the effete civilizations. It 
used to be charged that we were in such haste to 
grow rich that there was no health in us; and 
now that we are, or soon will be, the wealthiest 
nation in the world, they tell us that we continue 
to maintain the same feverish pace in all that we 
undertake or do. 

I am not sure that this charge could not be 
brought against the Englishman, Frenchman, or 
German of to-day with almost equal justice, or, 
in other words, that it is a charaderistic of the 
age rather than of our nation ; but that convic- 
tion would merely solace our pride and could not 
assuage " that tired feeling " of which so many 
are conscious. At all events, if we do not work 
harder than our kinsmen across the sea, we seem 
to bear the strain less well. It may be the climate, 
as my wife has said, which causes our nervous 
systems to rebel ; but then, again, we cannot 
change the climate, and consequently must adapt 
ourselves to its idiosyncrasies. 

Ever since we first began to declare that we 

[ 170 ] 



The Use of Time 



were superior to all other civilizations we have 
been noted for our energy. The way in which we 
did everything, from sawing wood to eledling a 
President, was conspicuous by virtue of the bust- 
ling, hustling qualities displayed. But it is no 
longer high treason to state that our national life, 
in spite of its bustle, was, until comparatively re- 
cently, lacking in color and variety. The citizen 
who went to bed on the stroke often every night 
and did pradlically the same thing each day from 
one year's end to the other was the ideal citizen 
of the Republic, and was popularly described as 
a conservative and a strong man. His life was 
led within very repressed limits, and anything 
more artistic than a chromo or religious motto 
was apt to irritate him and shock his principles. 
To be sure, we had then our cultivated class — 
more narrowly but possibly more deeply culti- 
vated than its flourishing successor of to-day — 
but the average American, despite his civic vir- 
tues and consciousness of redlitude, led a hum- 
drum existence, however hustling or bustling. 
There is a large percentage of our population that 
continues to live in much the same manner, not- 
withstanding the wave of enlightenment which 
has swept over the country and keyed us all up 

[ 171 ] 



The Art of Living 

to concert pitch by multiplying the number of 
our interests. I feel a little guilty in having in- 
cluded Rogers among this number, for I really 
know of my own knowledge nothing about his 
individual home life. It may be that I have been 
doing him a rank injustice, and that his home is 
in reality a seething caldron of progress. I re- 
ferred to him as a type rather than as an indi- 
vidual, knowing as I do that there are still too 
many homes in this country where music, art, 
literature, social tastes, and intelligent interest in 
human affairs in the abstradt, when developed 
beyond mere rudimentary lines, are unappreci- 
ated and regarded as vanities or inanities. 

On the other hand, there is nothing more in- 
teresting in our present national evolution than 
the eager recognition by the intelligent and as- 
piring portion of the people that we have been 
and are ignorant, and that the true zest of life 
lies in its many-sidedness and its possibilities of 
development along aesthetic, social, and intellec- 
tual as well as moral lines. The United States 
to-day is fairly bristling with eager, ambitious 
students, and with people of both sexes, young 
and middle-aged, who are anxiously seeking how 
to make the most of life. This eagerness of soul 

[ 172 ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



is not confined to any social class, and is notice- 
able in every sed:ion of the country in greater or 
less degree. It is quite as likely to be found among 
people of very humble means as among those 
whose earliest associations have brought them 
into contad: with the well-to-do and carefully 
educated. Therefore I beg the pardon of Rogers 
in case I have put him individually in the wrong 
category. A divine yet cheery activity has largely 
taken the place of sodden self-righteousness on 
the one hand, and analytical self-consciousness 
on the other. The class is not as yet very large 
as compared with the entire population of the 
country, but it is growing rapidly, and its mem- 
bers are the most interesting men and women of 
the Republic — those who are in the van of our 
development as a people. 

Overcrowded and congested lives signify at 
least earnestness and absorption. Human nature 
is more likely to aspire and advance when so- 
ciety is nervously adive, than when it is bovine 
and self-congratulatory. But nerves can endure 
only a certain amount of strain without remind- 
ing human beings that strong and healthy bodies 
are essential to true national progress. Only re- 
cently in this country have we learned to con- 

[ 173 ] 



The Art of Living 

sider the welfare of the body, and though we 
have begun to be deadly in earnest about ath- 
letics, the present generation of workers was, 
for the most part, brought up on the theory that 
flesh and blood was a limitation rather than a 
prerequisite. We are doing bravely in this matter 
so far as the education of our children is con- 
cerned, but it is too late to do much for our own 
nerves. Though stagnation is a more deplorable 
state, it behooves us, nevertheless, if possible, to 
rid ourselves of congestion for our ultimate 
safety. 

An adive man or woman stopping to think 
in the morning may well be appalled at the va- 
riety of his or her life. The ubiquity of the mo- 
dern American subconsciousness is something 
unique. We wish to know everything there is 
to know. We are interested not merely in our 
own and our neighbors' affairs — with a know- 
ledge of which so many citizens of other lands 
are peacefully contented — but we are eager to 
know, and to know with tolerable accuracy, what 
is going on all over the world — in England, 
China, Russia, and Australia. Not merely po- 
litically, but socially, artistically, scientifically, 
philosophically, and ethically. No subjed: is too 

[ 174 ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



technical for our interest, provided it comes in 
our way, whether it concern the canals in Mars 
or the antitoxin germ. The newspaper and the 
telegraph have done much to promote this ubi- 
quity of the mind's eye all over the world, but the 
interests of the average American are much wi- 
der and more diversified than those of any other 
people. An Englishman will have his hobbies 
and know them thoroughly, but regarding af- 
fairs beyond the pale of his limited inquiry he 
is deliberately and often densely ignorant. He 
reads, and reads augustly, one newspaper, one or 
two magazines — a few books; we, on the other 
hand, are not content unless we stretch out feel- 
ers in many directions and keep posted, as we 
call it, by hasty perusals of almost innumerable 
publications for fear lest something escape us. 
What does the Frenchman — the average intelli- 
gent Frenchman — know or care about the mode 
of our Presidential eledions, and whether this 
Republican or that Democrat has made or 
marred his political reputation ? We feel that we 
require to inform ourselves not only concerning 
the art and literature of France, but to have the 
names and doings of her statesmen at our fin- 
gers* ends for use in polite conversation, and the 

[ 175] 



The Art of Living 

satisfa6lion of the remains of the New England 
conscience. All this is highly commendable, if 
it does not tend to render us superficial. The 
more knowledge we have, the better, provided 
we do not fall into the slough of knowing noth- 
ing very well, or hunt our wits to death by over- 
acquisitiveness. There is so much nowadays to 
learn, and seemingly so little time in which to 
learn it, we cannot afford to spread ourselves too 
thin. 

The energy of our people has always been 
conspicuous in the case of women. The Ameri- 
can woman, from the earliest days of our history, 
has refused to be prevented by the limitations of 
time or physique from trying to include the en- 
tire gamut of human feminine adivity in her daily 
experience. There was a period when she could 
demonstrate successfully her ability to cook, 
sweep, rear and educate children, darn her hus- 
band's stockings, and yet entertain delightfully, 
dress tastefully, and be well versed in literature 
and all the current phases of high thinking. The 
New England woman of fifty years ago was cer- 
tainly an interesting specimen from this point 
of view, in spite of her morbid conscience and 
polar sexual proclivities. But among the well-to- 

[ 176] 



The Use of "Ti 



me 



do women of the nation to-day — the women who 
correspond socially to those just described — 
this achievement is possible only by taxing the 
human system to the point of distress, except 
in the newly or thinly settled portions of the 
country, where the style of living is simple and 
primitive. 

In the East, of course, in the cities and towns 
the women in question ceased long ago to do all 
the housework; and among the well-to-do, ser- 
vants have relieved her of much, if not of all of 
the physical labor. But, on the other hand, the 
complexities of our modern establishments, and 
the worry which her domestics cause her, make 
the burden of her responsibilities fully equal to 
what they were when she cooked flap-jacks and 
darned stockings herself. In other countries the 
women conversant with literature, art, and sci- 
ence, who go in for philanthropy, photography, 
or the ornamentation of china, who write papers 
on sociological or educational matters, are, for 
the most part, women of leisure in other resped;s. 
The American woman is the only woman at 
large in the universe who aims to be the wife 
and mother of a family, the mistress of an estab- 
lishment, a solver of world problems, a social 

[ 177 ] 



T^he Art of Living 

leader, and a philanthropist or artistic devotee 
at one and the same time. Each of these inter- 
ests has its determined followers among the wo- 
men of other civilizations, but nowhere except 
here does the eternal feminine seek to manifest 
itself in so many directions in the same individ- 
ual. 

This charadleristic of our womanhood is a vir- 
tue up to a certain point. The American woman 
has certainly impressed her theory that her sex 
should cease to be merely pliant, credulous, and 
ignorantly complacent so forcibly on the world 
that society everywhere has been afFed:ed by it. 
Her desire to make the most of herself, and to 
participate as completely as possible in the vital 
work of the world without neglecting the duties 
allotted to her by the older civilizations, is in the 
line of desirable evolution. But there is such a 
thing as being superficial, which is far more to be 
dreaded than even nervous prostration. Those 
absorbed in the earnest struggle of modern living 
may perhaps justly claim that to work until one 
drops is a noble fault, and that disregard of one*s 
own sensations and comfort is almost indispen- 
sable in order to accomplish ever so little. But 
there is nothing noble in superficiality; and it 

[ 178] 



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me 



would seem that the constant flitting from one 
interest to another, which so many American wo- 
men seem unable to avoid, must necessarily tend 
to prevent them from knowing or doing any- 
thing thoroughly. 

As regards the creature man, the critics of this 
country have been accustomed to assert that he 
was so much absorbed in making money, or in 
business, as our popular phrase is, that he had 
no time for anything else. This accusation used 
to be extraordinarily true, and in certain parts of 
the country it has not altogether ceased to be 
true; though even there the persistent masculine 
dollar-hunter regards wistfully and proudly the 
aesthetic propensities of the female members of 
his family, and feels that his labors are sweetened 
thereby. This is a very different attitude from 
the self-sufficiency of half a century ago. The 
difficulty now is that our intelligent men, like our 
women, are apt to attempt too much, inclined to 
crowd into each and every day more sensations 
than they can assimilate. An Englishwoman, 
prominent in educational matters, and intelligent 
withal, recently expressed her surprise to my 
wife, Barbara, that the American gentleman ex- 
isted. She had been long familiar with the Ameri- 

[ 179 ] 



T'he Art of Living 

can woman as a charming, if original, native pro- 
dud:, but she had never heard of the American 
gentleman — meaning thereby the alert, thought- 
ful man of high purposes and good-breeding. 
"How many there are !" the Briton went on to 
say in the enthusiasm of her surprise. Indeed 
there are. The men prominent in the leading 
walks of life all over this country now compare 
favorably, at least, with the best of other nations, 
unless it be that our intense desire to know 
everything has rendered, or may render, us ac- 
complished rather than profound. 



[ i8o] 



The Use of Time. 
II. 

MFTER all, whether this suggestion 
A (PM ^^ ^ tendency toward superficiality 



be well founded or not, the proper 
use of time has come to be a more 
serious problem than ever for the entire world. 
The demands of modern living are so exad:ing 
that men and women everywhere must exercise 
deliberate selection in order to live wisely. To 
lay down general rules for the use of time would 
be as futile as to insist that every one should use 
coats of the same size and color, and eat the same 
kind and quantity of food. The best modern liv- 
ing may perhaps be corred:ly defined as a happy 
compromise in the aims and actions of the indi- 
vidual between self-interest and altruism. 

If one seeks to illustrate this definition by ex- 
ample it is desirable in the first place to eliminate 
the individuals in the community whose use of 
time is so completely out of keeping with this 
dodrine that it is not worth while to consider 
them. Murderers, forgers, and criminals of all 
kinds, including business men who pradise petty 
thefts, and resped:able tradesmen who give short 

[ i8i ] 



The Art of Living 

weight and overcharge, instindlvely occur to us. 
So do mere pleasure-seekers, drunkards, and idle 
gentlemen. On the same theory we must exclude 
monks, deliberate celibates, nuns, and all fanati- 
cal or eccentric persons whose condu6t of life, 
however serviceable in itself as a leaven or an 
exception, could not be generally imitated with- 
out disaster to society. It would seem also as 
though we must exclude those who have yet to 
acquire such elemental virtues of wise living as 
cleanliness, reverence for the beautiful, and a cer- 
tain amount of altruism. There is nothing to 
learn as to the wise use of time from those whose 
conceptions of life are handicapped by the habit- 
ual use of slang and bad grammar and by un- 
tidiness; who regard the manifestations of good 
taste and fine scholarship as "frills," and who, 
though they be unselfish in the bosoms of their 
families, take no interest in the general welfare 
of the community. 

Let me in this last connexion anticipate the 
criticism of the sentimentalist and of the free-born 
American who wears a chip on his shoulder, by 
stating that time may be as beautifully and wisely 
spent, and life be as noble and serviceable to 
humanity in the home of the humblest citizen 

[ i82] 



The Use of Time 

as in that of the well-to-do or rich. Of course it 
may. Who questions it ? Did I not, in order not 
even to seem to doubt it, take back all I hazarded 
about the manner in which Rogers spends his 
time ? It may be just as beautifully and wisely 
spent, and very often is so. But, on the other 
hand, I suggest, timorously and respectfully, that 
it very often is not, and I venture further to ask 
whether the burden is not on democracy to show 
that the plain life of the plain people as at pre- 
sent conduced is a valuable example of wise and 
improving use of time ? The future is to account 
for itself, and we all have faith in democracy. We 
are all plain people in this country. But just as a 
passing inquiry, uttered not under my breath, 
yet without levity or malice, what is the contri- 
bution so far made by plainness as plainness to 
the best progress of the world ? Absolutely noth- 
ing, it seems to me. Progress has come from the 
superiority of individuals in every class of life to 
the mass of their contemporaries. The so-called 
plainness of the plain people too often serves at 
the present day as an influence to drag down the 
aspiring individual to the dead level of the mass 
which contents itself with bombastic cheapness 
of thought and adion. This is no plea against 

[ 183 ] 



"The Art of Living 

democracy, for democracy has come to stay ; but 
it is an argument why the best standards of liv- 
ing are more likely to be found among those who 
do not congratulate themselves on their plain- 
ness than those who are content to live no bet- 
ter and no worse than their neighbors. Discontent 
with self is a valuable Mentor in the apportion- 
ment of time. 

Therefore I offer as the most valuable study 
in the use of time under modern conditions the 
men and women in our large cities who are so 
far evolved that they are not tempted to commit 
common crimes, are well educated, earnest and 
pleasing, and are keenly desirous to effed: in their 
daily lives that happy compromise between self- 
interest and altruism to which I have referred as 
the goal of success in the use of time. Let us con- 
sider them from the point of every day in the 
week and of the four seasons. In every man's life 
his occupation, the calling or profession by which 
he earns his bread, must necessarily be the chief 
consumer of his time. We Americans have never 
been an idle race, and it is rare that the father of 
a family exposes himself to the charge of sloth. 
His work may be unintelligent or bungling, but 
he almost invariably spends rather too much than 

[ 184] 



The Use of 7"/ 



me 



too little time over it. If you ask him why, he 
says he cannot help it ; that in order to get on 
he must toil early and late. If he is successful, 
he tells you that otherwise he cannot attend to 
all he has to do. There is plausibility in this. 
Competition is undoubtedly so fierce that only 
those who devote themselves heart and soul to 
any calling are likely to succeed. Moreover, the 
consciousness of success is so engrossing and in- 
spiriting that one may easily be tempted to sacri- 
fice everything else to the game. 

But can it be doubted, on the other hand, that 
the man who refuses to become the complete 
slave either of endeavor or success is a better 
citizen than he who does ? The chief sinners in 
this resped: in our modern life are the successful 
men, those who are in the thick of life doing 
reasonably well. The man who has not arrived, 
or who is beginning, must necessarily have lei- 
sure for other things for the reason that his time 
is not fully employed, but the really busy worker 
must make an effort or he is lost. If he does not 
put his foot down and determine what else he 
will do beside pursuing his vocation every day 
in the year except Sunday, and often on Sunday 
to boot, he may be robust enough to escape a 

C 185] 



The Art of Living 

premature grave, but he will certainly not make 
the best use of his life. 

The difficulty for such men, of course, is to se- 
lect what they will do. There are so many things, 
that it is easy to understand why the mind which 
abhors superficiality should be tempted to shut 
its ears out of sheer desperation to every other 
interest but business or profession. If every one 
were to do that what would be the result ? Our 
leading men would simply be a horde of self- 
seekers, in spite of the fa6l that their individual 
work in their several callings was conscientious 
and unsparing of self. Deplorable as a too great 
multiplicity of interests is apt to be to the wel- 
fare and advancement of an ambitious man, the 
motive which prompts him to endeavor to do 
many things is in reality a more noble one, and 
one more beneficial to society than absorption 
to excess in a vocation. The cardinal principle 
in the wise use of time is to discover what one 
can do without and to seledl accordingly. Man's 
duty to his spiritual nature, to his aesthetic na- 
ture, to his family, to public affairs, and to his 
social nature, are no less imperative than his duty 
to his daily calling. Unless each of these is in 
some measure catered to, man falls short in his 

[ i86 ] 



T^he Use of Time 

true obligations. Not one of them can be ne- 
gleded. Some men think they can lighten the 
load to advantage by disregarding their religious 
side. Others congratulate themselves that they 
never read novels or poetry, and speak disre- 
spedfuUy of the works of new schools of art as 
daubs. A still larger number shirks attention to 
political and social problems, and declares bluffly 
that if a man votes twice a year and goes to a 
caucus, when he is sent for in a carriage by the 
committee, it is all that can be expelled of a busy 
man. Another large contingent swathes itself in 
graceless virtue, and professes to thank God that 
it keeps aloof from society people and their do- 
ings. Then we are all familiar with the man who 
has no time to know his own family, though, 
fortunately, he is less common than he used to 
be. 

If I were asked to seledl what one influence 
more than another wastes the spare time of the 
modern man, I should be inclined to specify the 
reading of newspapers. The value of the modern 
daily newspaper as a short cut to knowledge of 
what is a6lually happening in two hemispheres 
is indisputable, provided it is read regularly so 
that one can eliminate from the consciousness 

[ 187 ] 



The Art of Living 

those fads which are contradided or qualified on 
the following day. Of course it is indispensable 
to read the morning, and perhaps the evening, 
newspaper in order to know what is going on 
in the world. But the persistent reading of many 
newspapers, or the whole of almost any news- 
paper, is nearly as detrimental to the economy 
of time as the cigarette habit to health. Fifteen 
minutes a day is ample time in which to glean 
the news, and the busy man who aspires to use 
his time to the best advantage may well skip the 
rest. There is no doubt that many of our news- 
papers contain some of the best thought of the 
day scattered through their encyclopaedic col- 
umns; but there is still less doubt that they are 
conduced to please, first of all, those who other- 
wise would read nothing. From this point of 
view they are most valuable educators; more- 
over, the chara6ler of the newspaper is steadily 
improving, and it is evident that those in charge 
of the best of them are seeking to raise the pub- 
lic taste instead of writing down to it; but the 
fad: remains that they at present contain com- 
paratively little which the earnest man can afford 
to linger over if he would avoid mental dissipa- 
tion of an insidious kind. A newspaper contain- 

[ i88 ] 



The Use of Time 



ing only the news and the really vital thought of 
the day compressed into short space is among the 
successful enterprises of the future which some 
genius will perpetuate. How many of us, already, 
weary of the social gossip, the sensational per- 
sonalities, the nauseous details of crime, the cus- 
tom-made articles, the Sunday special features, 
the ubiquitous portrait, and finally the colored 
cartoon, would write our names large on such a 
subscription-list ! 

In the matter of books, too, the modern man 
and woman may well exercise a determined 
choice. There is so much printed nowadays be- 
tween ornamental covers, that any one is liable 
to be misled by sheer bewilderment, and delib- 
erate seledlion is necessary to save us from being 
mentally starved with plenty. We cannot always 
be reading to acquire positive knowledge; enter- 
tainment and self-oblivion are quite as legitimate 
motives for the hard worker as meditated self- 
improvement; but whether we read philosophy 
and history, or the novel, the poem, and the 
essay, it behooves us to read the best of its kind. 
From this standpoint the average book club is 
almost a positive curse. A weekly quota of books 
appears on our library tables, to be devoured in 

[ 189 ] 



The Art of Living 

seven days. We read them because they come 
to us by lot, not because we have chosen them 
ourselves. There is published in every year of 
this publishing age a certain number of books 
of positive merit in the various departments of 
literature and thought, which a little intelligent 
inquiry would enable us to discover. By reading 
fewer books, and making sure that the serious 
ones were sound and the light or clever ones 
really diverting, the modern man and woman 
would be gainers both in time and approbation. 
In this connexion let me head off again the sen- 
timentalist and moralist by noting that old friends 
in literature are often more satisfying and enga- 
ging than new. Those of us who are in the thick 
of life are too apt to forget to take down from 
our shelves the comrades we loved when we 
were twenty-one — the essayists, the historians, 
the poets, and novelists whose delightful pages 
are the literature of the world. An evening at 
home with Shakespeare is not the depressing 
experience which some clever people imagine. 
One rises from the feast to go to bed with all 
one's aesthetic being refreshed and fortified as 
though one had inhaled oxygen. What a con- 
trast this to the stuffy taste in the roof of the 

[ 190 ] 



The Use of Time 

mouth, and the weary, dejeded frame of mind 
which follow the perusal of much of the current 
literature which cozening booksellers have in- 
duced the book club secretary to buy. 

A very little newspaper reading and a limited 
amount of seleded reading will leave time for 
the hobby or avocation. Every man or woman 
ought to have one; something apart from busi- 
ness, profession, or housekeeping, in which he 
or she is interested as a study or pursuit. In this 
age of the world it may well take the form of 
educational, economic, or philanthropic investi- 
gation, or co-operation, if individual tastes hap- 
pen to incline one to such work. The prominence 
of such matters in our present civilization is, of 
course, a magnet favorable to such a choice. In 
this way one can, as it were, kill two birds with 
one stone, develop one's own resources and per- 
form one's duty toward the public. But, on the 
other hand, there will be many who have no 
sense of fitness for this service, and whose pre- 
diledions lead them toward art, science, litera- 
ture, or some of their ramifications. The amateur 
photographer, the extender of books, the ob- 
server of birds, are alike among the faithful. To 
have one hobby and not three or four, and to per- 

[ 191 ] 



Th e A)^ t of L, I vi n g 

severe slowly but steadily in the fulfilment of 
one's seleClion, is an important fadlor in the wise 
disposal of time. It is a truism to declare that a 
few minutes in every day allotted to the same 
piece of work will accomplish wonders; but the 
result of trying will convince the incredvilous. 
Indeed one's avocation should progress and pre- 
vail by force of spare minutes allotted daily and 
continuously; just so much and no more, so as 
not to crowd out the other claimants for con- 
sideration. Fifteen minutes before breakfast, or 
between kissing the children good-night and the 
evening meal, or even every other Saturday af- 
ternoon and a part of every holiday, will make 
one's hobby look well-fed and sleek at the end 
of a few years. 

Perhaps the most difficult side of one's nature 
to provide for adequately is the social side. It is 
easy enough to make a hermit of one's self and 
go nowhere; and it is easy enough to let one's 
self be sucked into the vortex of endless social 
recreation until one's sensations become akin to 
those of a highly varnished humming-top. I am 
not quite sure which is the worse; but I am in- 
clined to believe that the hermit, especially if 
self-righteous, is more detestable in that he is 

C '9'^ ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



less altruistic. He may be a more superior person 
than the gadfly of society, but ethics no longer 
sandtions self-cultivation purely for the benefit 
of self. Every man and woman who seeks to play 
an intelligent part in the world ought to manage 
to dine out and attend other social fundions 
every now and then, even if it be necessary to 
bid for invitations. Most of us have more invi- 
tations than we can possibly accept, and find the 
problem of entertaining and being entertained an 
exceedingly perplexing one to solve from the 
standpoint of time. But in spite of the social 
proclivities of most of us, there are still many 
people who feel that they are fulfilling their com- 
plete duty as members of society if they live 
lives of stridl rediitude far from the madding 
crowd of so-called society people, and never 
darken the doors of anybody. It is said that it 
takes all sorts of people to make up the world, 
but disciplinarians and spoil-sports of this sort 
are so tiresome that they would not be missed 
were they and their homilies to be translated pre- 
maturely to another sphere. 

Those of us, however, who profess a contrary 
faith, experience difficulty at times in being true 
to it, and are often tempted to slip back into do- 

[ ^n ] 



"The Art of Living 

mestic isolation by the feverishness of our social 
life. It sometimes seems as though there were no 
middle way between being a humming-top and a 
hermit. Yet nothing is more fatal to the wise use 
of time than the acceptance of every invitation 
received, unless it be the refusal of every one. 
Here again moderation and choice are the only 
safeguards, in spite of the assurance of friends 
that it is necessary to go a great deal in order to 
enjoy one's self. In our cities the bulk of the en- 
tertainments of the year happen in the four win- 
ter months ; from which many far from frivolous 
persons argue that the only way is to dine out 
every night, and go to everything to which one 
is asked during this period, and make up be- 
tween April 15th and December 15th for any 
arrears due the other demands of one's nature. 
This is plausible, but a dangerous theory, if car- 
ried to excess. Wise living consists in living 
wisely from day to day, without excepting any 
season. Three evenings in a week spent away 
from one's own fireside may not be an easy limit 
for some whose social interests are varied, but 
both the married and the single who regret po- 
litely in order to remain tranquilly at home four 
evenings out of seven, need not fear that they 

[ 194 ] 



The Use of Time 

have neglected the social side of life even in the 
gayest of seasons. 

And here, for the sake of our sometimes dense 
friend the moralist — especially the morahst of 
the press, who raves against society people from 
the virtuous limit of an occasional afternoon tea 
— let me add that by entertainments and recrea- 
tion I intend to include not merely formal balls 
and dinner-parties, but all the forms of more or 
less innocent edification and diversion — teas, 
reform meetings, theatres, receptions, concerts, 
ledures, clubs, sociables, fairs, and tableaux, by 
which people all over the country are brought 
together to exchange ideas and opinions in good- 
humored fellowship. 

In the apportionment of time the considera- 
tion of one's physical health is a paramount ne- 
cessity, not merely for a reasonably long life, but 
to temper the mind's eye so that the point of 
view remain sane and wholesome. An over- 
wrought nervous system may be capable of spas- 
modic spurts, but sustained useful work is im- 
possible under such conditions. To die in harness 
before one's time may be fine, and in exceptional 
cases unavoidable, but how much better to live 
in harness and do the work which one has un- 

[ I9S 3 



The Art of Living 

dertaken without breaking down. Happily the 
young men and women of the country of the 
present generation may almost be said to have 
athletics and fresh air on the brain. What with 
opportunity and precept they can scarcely help 
living up to the mark in this respedl. The grown- 
up men and women, absorbed in the struggle of 
life, are the people who need to keep a watchful 
eye upon themselves. It is so easy to let the 
hour's fresh air and exercise be crowded out by 
the things which one feels bound to do for the 
sake of others, and hence for one's immortal soul. 
We argue that it will not matter if we omit our 
walk or rest for a day or two, and so we go on 
from day to day, until we are brought up with 
a round turn, as the saying is, and realize, in case 
we are still alive, that we are chronic invalids. 
The walk, the ride, the drive, the yacht, the bi- 
cycle, the search for wild flowers and birds, the 
angler's outing, the excursion with a camera, 
the deliberate open-air breathing spell on the 
front platform of a street-car, some one of these 
is within the means and opportunities of every 
busy worker, male and female. 

For many of us the most begrudged under- 
taking of all is to find time for what we owe to 

[ 196 ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



the world at large or the State, the State with a 
capital S, as it is written nowadays. There is no 
money in such bestowals, no private gain or emol- 
ument. What we give we give as a tribute to pure 
altruism, or, in other words, because as men and 
women we feel that it is one of the most impor- 
tant elements in wise living. It is indisputable 
that there was never so much disinterested en- 
deavor in behalf of the community at large as 
there is to-day, but at the same time it is true 
that the agitations and work are accomplished by 
a comparatively small number of people. There 
are probably among the intelligent, aspiring por- 
tion of the population at least five persons who 
intend to interest themselves in public affairs, and 
regard doing so as essential to a useful life, to 
every one who puts his theories into pradice. 
No man or woman can do everything. We can- 
not as individuals at one and the same time busy 
ourselves successfully in education, philanthropy, 
political reform, and economic science. But if 
every one would take an a6live, earnest concern 
in something, in some one thing, and look into 
it slowly but thoroughly, this man or woman in 
the public schools, this in the methods of mu- 
nicipal government, and this in the problems of 

[ 197 ] 



The Art of Living 

crime or poverty, reforms would necessarily pro- 
ceed much faster. Just a little work every other 
day or every week. Let it be your hobby if you 
will, if you have no time for a hobby too. If five 
thousand men in every large city should take an 
active interest in and give a small amount of time 
in every week to the school question, we should 
soon have excellent public schools; if another five 
thousand would devote themselves to the affairs 
of municipal government in a similar fashion, 
would there be so much corruption as at pre- 
sent, and would so inferior a class of citizens be 
chosen to be aldermen and to fill the other city 
offices ? And so on to the end of the chapter. Is 
not something of the kind the duty of every earn- 
est man and woman ? Let those who boast of be- 
ing plain people put this into their pipes and 
smoke it. When the self-styled working-classes 
are prohibited by law from working more than 
eight hours, will they contribute of their spare 
time to help those who are trying to help 
them ? 

American men have the reputation of being 
considerate husbands and indulgent fathers ; but 
they have been apt at all events, until recently, 
to make permission to spend take the place of 

[ 198 3 



The Use of Time 

personal comradeship. This has been involun- 
tarily and regretfully ascribed to business pres- 
sure ; but fatalistic remorse is a poor substitute 
for duty, even though the loved ones eat off gold 
plate and ride in their own carriages as a conse- 
quence. We Americans who have begotten chil- 
dren in the last twenty years do not need to be 
informed that the time given to the society of 
one's wife and family is the most precious expen- 
diture of all, both for their sakes and our own. 
But though the truth is obvious to us, are we not 
sometimes conscious at the end of the week that 
the time due us and them has been squandered 
or otherwise appropriated ? Those walks and 
talks, those pleasant excursions from city to 
country, or country to city, those quiet after- 
noons or evenings at home, which are possible 
to every man and woman who love each other 
and their children, are among the most valuable 
aids to wise living and peace of mind which daily 
existence affords. Intimacy and warm sympathy, 
precept and loving companionship, are worth all 
the indulgent permission and unexpe6led cheques 
in the world. Some people, when Sunday or a 
holiday comes, seem to do their best to get rid 
of their families and to try to amuse themselves 

[ 199 ] 



The Art of Living 

apart from them. Such men and women are shut- 
ting out from their Uves the purest oxygen which 
civihzation affords ; for genuine comradeship of 
husband and wife, and father or mother and child, 
purges the soul and tends to clear the mind's eye 
more truly than any other influence. 

Lastly and firstly, and in close compa6t with 
sweet domesticity and faithful friendship, stand 
the spiritual demands of our natures. We must 
have time to think and meditate. Just as the flow- 
ers need the darkness and the refreshing dew, the 
human soul requires its quiet hours, its season 
for meditation and rest. Whatever we may be- 
lieve, whatever doubts we may entertain regard- 
ing the mysteries of the universe, who will main- 
tain that the aspiring side of man is a delusion 
and an unreality? In the time — often merely 
minutes — which we give to contemplation and 
serious review of what we are doing, lies the se- 
cret of the wise plan, if not the execution. To go 
on helter-skelter from day to day without a pur- 
pose in our hearts resembles playing a hurdy- 
gurdy for a living without the hope of pence. 
The use of Sunday in this country has changed 
so radically in the last twenty-five years that 
every one is free to spend it as he will, subjed: 

[ aoo ] 



The Use of Ti 



me 



to certain restridions as to sport and entertain- 
ment in public calculated to offend those who 
would prefer stricter usages. But whether we 
choose to go to church or not, whether our as- 
pirations are fostered in the sanduary or the fresh 
air, the eternal needs of the soul must be pro- 
vided for. If we give our spare hours and min- 
utes merely to careless amusement, we cannot 
fail to degenerate in nobility of nature, just as 
we lose the hue of health when we sully the red 
corpuscles of the body with foul air and steam 
heat. Are we not nowadays, even the plain peo- 
ple, God bless them, too much disposed to be- 
lieve that merely to be comfortable and amused 
and rested is the sole requirement of the human 
soul ? It does need rest most of the time in this 
age of pressure. Heaven knows, and comfort and 
amusement are necessary. But may we not, even 
while we rest and are comfortable, under the blue 
sky or on the peaceful river, if you will, lift up 
our spirits to the mystery of the ages, and reach 
out once more toward the eternal truths? Merely 
to be comfortable and to get rested once a week 
will not bring those truths nearer. May we not, 
in the pride of our democracy, afford to turn our 
glances back to the pages of history, to the long 

[ 20I ] 



The Art of Living 

line of mighty men kneeling before the altar with 
their eyes turned up to God, and the prayer of 
faith and repentance on their lips ? Did this all 
mean nothing ? Are we so wise and certain and 
far-seeing that we need not do likewise ? 



/ 



[ 202 ] 



The Summer Problem. 

I. 

^^^^^pHAT is the good American to 

Wj^, do with himself or herself in sum- 
^f mer ? The busiest worker now- 
^^ adays admits that a vacation of a 
^o^P^P fortnight in hot weather is at least 
desirable. Philanthropy sends yearly more and 
more children on an outing in August, as one of 
the best contributions to the happiness and wel- 
fare of the poor. The atmosphere of our large 
cities in midsummer is so lifeless and oppressive 
that every one who can get away for some part 
of the summer plans to do so, and fathers of 
families find themselves annually confronted by 
a serious problem. 

I specify the father of a family because the 
problem is so much easier for a single man. The 
single man, and generally the single woman, can 
pack a bag and go to the beach or mountains, or 
to a hotel within easy distance from town, with- 
out much premeditation. The worst that can hap- 
pen to them is that they may become engaged 
without intention ; besides they can always come 
home if they are dissatisfied with their surround- 

[ ^03 ] 



The Art of Living 

ings. But the family man who lives in a large 
city finds more and more difficulty every year, 
as the country increases in population, in mak- 
ing up his mind how best to provide for the 
midsummer necessities of his wife and children. 
There are several courses of adion open to 
him. 

He can remain in town and keep his family 
there. 

He can remain in town himself and send his 
family to a distance. 

He can hire a house or lodgings by the sea or 
in the country within easy reach of town by rail- 
road or steamboat. 

He can send his family to a summer hotel at a 
distance, or take a house or lodgings at a dis- 
tance, making occasional flying trips to and from 
town, according to his opportunities. 

To stay in town and keep one's family there 
is a far from disagreeable experience except in 
very large cities in unusually hot weather. The 
custom of going away from home in summer is 
one which has grown by force of imitation. The 
inclination to change one's surroundings, and to 
give the wife and children a whifF of country or 
sea or mountain air for a few weeks in the course 

[ 204 ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



of the year is an ambition which is neither god- 
less nor extravagant. But it is not worth while 
to set this necessity up as an idol to be wor- 
shipped at the expense of comfort for the rest of 
the year, for, after all, our ancestors successfully 
reared large families of children, including some 
of us, without going away from home in the sum- 
mer, and "the-can't-get-aways'* in our largest 
and most uncomfortable cities still outnumber 
those who can and do in the proportion of at 
least five to one. It costs more to go away than 
to stay in town ; from which certain native philo- 
sophers, who maintain that any one who spends 
more than twenty-five hundred dollars on his 
family in any one year is not a good American, 
may argue that those who have both a summer 
and a winter home are aristocrats and material- 
ists. Their argument is not likely to diminish 
summer travel, to bankrupt the summer hotels, 
or to induce the well-to-do American citizen to 
shut up his cottage. A change in summer, for a 
longer or shorter period, is generally recognized 
as one of the most healthful and improving ad- 
vantages which a father in our civilization can 
give his family and himself. On the other hand, 
to go out of town simply because one's neigh- 

[ 205 ] 



The Art of Living 

bors do, when one cannot afford it, is a pitiful 
performance. 

Moreover, the man who does not send his 
family out of town from motives of economy, 
has more than a clean conscience to comfort him. 
He can remember that probably one-third of 
the annual experiments in summer culture and 
health-giving recreation, made by his friends 
and acquaintance, turn out dire failures, and 
that another one-third result in mixed joy and 
comfort. He can refled too, if he lives in the 
suburbs of a city, or in a town or small city, that, 
barring a few exceptionally hot days, he and his 
family are really very comfortable at home. Even 
if his household gods are in a parboiled metropo- 
lis, he will commonly be able to relieve his te- 
dium and physical discomfort by some form of 
excursion. All our seaboard cities have their mid- 
summer Meccas for the multitude in the form 
of beaches; and even where no ocean breezes 
blow, there is usually close at hand verdure, a 
lake, a grove, or a river where the philosophical 
soul can forget the thermometer, and cease to 
commiserate with itself on being kept in town. 
One's own bed is never humpy, and the hollows 
in it are just fitted to one's bones or adipose de- 

[ 206 ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



velopments. One can eat and drink in one's 
town-house without fear of indigestion or germs. 
Decidedly the happiness of staying at home is 
not much less than the happiness of passing one, 
two, or three months at a place where everything 
is uncomfortable or nasty, at a cost which one 
can ill afford, if at all. Good city milk and succu- 
lent city vegetables are luxuries which are rarely 
to be found at the ordinary summer resort. 

It is difficult to convince one's family of this 
in advance. Besides, man is always to be blessed. 
We are always hoping that the next summer will 
be a grand improvement on those which have 
gone before, and generally by the first of May we 
believe, or at least imagine, that we have discov- 
ered the genuine article — the ideal spot at last. 
Discovered it for our families. The American 
father has the trick of sending his family out of 
town for the summer, and staying at home him- 
self. This had its origin probably in his sup- 
posed inability to escape from business in the 
teeth of the family craving to see something of 
the world outside of their own social acquain- 
tance. Yet he acknowledged the force of the fam- 
ily argument that with such a large country to 
explore it would be a pity not to explore it; and 

[ 207 ] 



The Art of Living 

accordingly he said, "Go, and I will join you if 
and when I can." Paterfamilias said this long 
ago, and in some instances he has vainly been 
trying to join them ever since. There are all 
sorts of trying in this world, and perhaps his has 
not been as determined as some; nevertheless, 
he has maintained tolerably well the reputation 
of trying. The Saturday night trains and steam- 
boats all over the country are vehicles, from 
July first to Odober first, of an army of fathers 
who are trying successfully to join their nearest 
and dearest at the different summer-resorts of 
the land. 

To be separated for three months from one*s 
wife and children, except for a day or two once a 
fortnight, is scarcely an ideal domestic arrange- 
ment, in spite of the fad that it is more or less 
delightful for the dear ones to meet new people 
and see new scenes. The American father may 
not try very hard to leave his city home, but it 
must be admitted that he has been an amiable 
biped on the score of the summer question. He 
has been and is ready to suffer silently for the 
sake of his family and his business. But now that 
he has made up his mind at last that he prefers to 
leave his business for the sake of his family and 

[ 208 ] 



The Summer Problem 

his own health, the difficulties of sending them to 
a distance are more apparent to him. Ten or fif- 
teen years ago it dawned upon him that the city 
in summer without his family was not the ideal 
spot his fancy had painted, and that the sea-side 
and country, especially the former, were, after all, 
the best place for an over-worked, full-grown 
man on a summer's afternoon. It dawned upon 
him, too, that there was sea-coast and country 
close at hand where he could establish his family 
and refresh himself at the end of every day*s 
work. Twenty-five years ago the marine and at- 
tra6tive suburban environs of our cities were 
substantially unappropriated. To-day they bris- 
tle with cottages, large and small, the summer 
homes of city men. Every available promontory, 
island, hill, nook, and crook, which commands 
a pleasing view or is visited by cooling breezes 
is, or soon will be, occupied. What can a busy 
man do better, if he can affiard it, than buy or 
hire a cottage, as humble as you like, to which 
he can return in the afternoon to the bosom of 
his own family, and be comfortable and lazy un- 
til morning? 

From the domestic point of view this is assur- 
edly the most satisfad:ory arrangement for the 

[ 209 ] 



The Art of Living 

father, and the American paterfamilias, ever since 
the truth dawned upon him, has been prompt in 
recognizing the fad:. He has builded, too, ac- 
cording to his taste, whim, and individual idio- 
syncrasies. A sea-side cottage within easy reach 
of town includes, to-day, every variety of shelter 
from a piduresque villa of the most super-civil- 
ized type to the hulk of a ship fitted up as a 
camping-out home. To a large extent, too, the 
hotel has been discarded in favor of the domestic 
hearth, even though the single chimney smokes 
so that tears are perpetually in the domestic eye. 
The well-to-do city man who comes to town 
every day appreciates that a hotel is a poor place 
for children; consequently the long piazzas, 
where the terrible infant forever used to abound, 
are now trodden chiefly by visitors from a dis- 
tance and transients who have escaped from the 
city for a day in search of a sea-bath and a clam 
chowder. 

If the summer cottage to which the husband 
returns at night, is not the most satisfadory ar- 
rangement for the mother, she must blame her- 
self or the civilization in which she lives. The 
sole argument in favor of passing the summer 
at a hotel is that the wife and mother escapes 

[ ^lo ] 



'The Summer Problem 

thereby the cares of housekeeping, too often so 
severe during the rest of the year that the pros- 
ped: of not being obHged to order dinner for 
three months causes her to wake in the night 
and laugh hysterically. Formality and conven- 
tional ceremony are the lurking enemies of our 
American summer life, who threaten to deprive 
our mothers and daughters of the rest and vaca- 
tion from the tension, excitement, and worry 
begotten by nine months of adlive domestic du- 
ties. Simplicity of living ought to be the control- 
ling warm-weather maxim of every household 
where the woman at the head of the establish- 
ment does the housekeeping, as nine thousand 
nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of ten 
thousand in America do. 

It may be argued that greater simplicity in 
living all the year round would enable the wife 
and mother to do without a vacation. Possibly. 
But unfortunately for her the trend of the tide 
is all the other way. Besides, simplicity is such 
a difficult word to conjure with. Her interests 
have become so varied that the wear and tear is 
quite as likely to proceed from new mental striv- 
ings as from a multiplicity of sheer domestic 
duties. At least there seems to be no immediate 

[.II ] 



The Art of Living 

prosped: that she will be less tired in the spring, 
however exemplary her intentions, and it there- 
fore behooves her not to allow the wave of in- 
creasing luxury to bear her on its crest through 
the summer and land her in her town-house in 
Od;ober a physical and mental wreck. 

The external attractiveness of the modern 
summer cottage, with its pleasing angles and 
comely stains, is easily made an excuse for an 
artistic interior and surroundings to match. But 
artistic beauty in summer can readily be pro- 
duced without elaboration, and at comparatively 
slight cost, if we only choose to be content with 
simple effects. The bewitching charm of the sum- 
mer girl, if analyzed, proves to be based on a 
few cents a yard and a happy knack of combin- 
ing colors and trifles. Why need we be solicitous 
to have all the paraphernalia of winter-life — 
meals with many courses, a retinue of servants, 
wines, festal attire, and splendid entertainments ? 
While we rejoice that the promiscuous comrade- 
ship of hotel life has largely given place at New- 
port, Bar Harbor, Lenox, and our other fashion- 
able watering-places to the pleasant protedion 
of the cottage home, is it not seriously deplorable 
that simplicity is too often lost sight of? To be 

[ 21^ ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



comfortable is one thing, to be swathed in luxury 
or to be tortured by ceremony all the time is an- 
other. It seems strange to many of us, who cannot 
choose precisely what we will do and where we will 
go in summer, that those who can so often seled: a 
mere repetition of mid-winter social recreation. 

There is Patterson the banker for instance, the 
employer of Rogers. He can go where he pleases, 
and he goes to Newport. One can see him any 
afternoon driving augustly on Bellevue Avenue 
or along the ocean drive, well gloved, well shod, 
and brilliantly necktied, in his landau beside Mrs. 
Patterson. They have been to Newport for years 
in summer, and their house, with its beautiful out- 
look to sea, has doubled and trebled in value. H ow 
do they pass their time? Entertain and let them- 
selves be entertained. Dinners with formal co- 
mestibles, late dances, champagne luncheons, /)<^/<? 
defoisgras picnics on a coach are their daily asso- 
ciations. Mr. and Mrs. Patterson are close upon 
sixty themselves, but they follow — a little more 
solemnly than formerly, but still without stint — 
the same programme, which grows more and more 
elaborate with each succeeding year. It was there 
that their youngest daughter was married six 
months ago, with widely heralded splendor, to a 

[ 213 ] 



The Art of Living 

Russian nobleman who speaks beautiful English. 
May her lot be a happy one ! The son, who went 
through the Keeley cure, and the elder daughter, 
who is separated from her husband, have spent 
their summers at Newport from their youth up. 

There are comparatively few who have the 
means to live, or who do live just like Patterson, 
but there is many a man of fine instindis and with 
a sufficient income to maintain a summer home, 
who finds himself to-day oppressed by the incu- 
bus of things. He seeks rest, books, fresh air, 
the opportunity to enjoy nature — the sea, the 
foliage, the flowers — and yet he is harassed by 
things, the very things he has all winter, with a 
garnishment suitable to hot weather. He wishes 
to be still ; and things keep him moving. He 
yearns to strip off, if not all his clothing, at least 
enough of it to give his lungs and his soul full 
play ; but things keep him faultlessly dressed. 
He intends to slake his thirst only from the old 
oaken bucket or the milk-pail, and things keep 
his palate titillated with champagne and cock- 
tails. Our old-time simplicity in summer is per- 
haps no longer possible in the large watering- 
places. It is even with considerable satisfadion 
that we don, and see our wives and children don, 

[ ^H ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



the attradive clothing which has taken the place 
of shirt-sleeves and flannel shirts as articles of 
toilette ; but is it not time to cry halt in our pro- 
cession toward luxury, if we do not wish to live 
on our nerves all the year round ? 

It is this difficulty in escaping the expenses 
and the formality of city life in the summer cot- 
tage or at the summer hotel, almost as much as 
the fad that the desirable locations near town 
have all been taken, which is inclining the Ameri- 
can father to send his family to a distance. After 
twenty-five years of exploration the outlying 
beaches and other favorite resorts near our large 
cities have become so thoroughly appropriated 
that the man who wishes to build or own a sum- 
mer home of his own is obliged to look else- 
where. As a consequence cottages have sprung 
up all along the line of our coast, from the far- 
thest confines of Maine to New Jersey, on the 
shores of the lakes of the Middle West, and on 
the Pacific shore. Many of these are of a simple 
and attractive charader, and generally they stand 
in small colonies, large enough for companion- 
ship and not too large for relaxation. With the 
similar double purpose of obtaining an attradive 
summer home at a reasonable price, and of avoid- 

[^15 ] 



The Art of Living 

ing the stock watering-place, city families are 
utilizing also the abandoned farm. There is not 
room for us all on the sea-coast; besides those 
of us whose winter homes are there are more 
likely to need inland or mountain air. There are 
thousands of beautiful country spots, many of 
them not so very far from our homes, where the 
run-down farm can be redeemed, if not to sup- 
ply milk and butter, at least to afford a pidtur- 
esque shelter and a lovely landscape during the 
season when we wish to be out of doors as much 
as possible. A very few changes, a very little 
painting and refurnishing will usually transform 
the farm-house itself into just the sort of estab- 
lishment which a family seeking rest and quiet 
recreation ought to delight in. You may bring 
mosquito-frames for the windows if you like, and 
you must certainly test the well-water. Then 
swing your hammock between two apple-trees 
and thank Providence that you are not like so 
many of your friends and acquaintances, working 
the tread-mill of society in the dog-days. 

Of course most men who have homes of this 
description at a distance cannot be with their 
families all the time. But, on the other hand, the 
conviction that a busy man can do better work in 

[ 216 ] 



'Th e Summer Problem 

ten or eleven months than in twelve, is gaining 
ground, and most of us, if we only choose to, can 
slip away for at least three weeks. Many of the 
demands of modern civilization on the family 
purse cannot be resisted without leaving the hus- 
band and parent a little depressed; but it seems 
to me that a serious item of expense may be 
avoided, and yet all the genuine benefits and 
pleasures of a change of scene and atmosphere be 
obtained, if we only dismiss from our minds the 
idea of living otherwise than simply. A little 
house with very little in it, with a modest piazza, 
a skiflFor sail-boat which does not pretend to be a 
yacht, a garden hoe and rake, a camera, books and 
a hammock, a rod which is not too precious or 
costly to break, one nag of plebeian blood and 
something to harness him to, rabbits in the barn 
and sunflowers in the garden, a walk to sunset 
hill and a dialogue with the harvest moon — why 
should we not set our summer life to such a tune, 
rather than hanker for the neighborhood of the 
big steam-yacht and polo-ground, for the fringe 
of the fashionable bathing beach, for the dust of 
the stylish equipage, and try in our several ways, 
and beyond our means, to follow the pace which 
is set for us by others ? 

[ 217 ] 



The Summer Problem. 
II. 

^JfftjH Y ? Largely on account of that 

W,M* newly created species, the American 
„,/ ^» sirl. From solicitude for her happi- 
^^^ ness and out of deference to her 
wishes. Many a father and mother would be de- 
lighted to pass the summer on an abandoned 
farm or in any other spot where it were possible 
to live simply and to be cool, comfortable, and 
lazy, but for fear of disappointing their young 
people — principally their daughters, who, un- 
like the sons, cannot yet come and go at will. 
Feminine youth has its inherent privileges every- 
where, but the gentle sway which it exercises in 
other civilizations has become almost a sour ty- 
ranny here. Was there ever an American mother 
who knew anything portrayed in fidlion ? The 
American daughter is commonly presented as a 
noble-souled, original creature, whose principal 
mission in life, next to or incidental to refusing 
the man who is not her choice, is to let her own 
parents understand what weak, ignorant, foolish, 
unenlightened persons they are in comparison 
with the rising generation — both parents in 

[ai8 ] 



Th e Summer Problem 

some measure, but chiefly and utterly the mo- 
ther. She is usually willing to concede that her 
father has a few glimmering ideas, and a certain 
amount of sense — horse business sense, not very 
elevating or inspiring — yet something withal. 
But she looks upon her poor dear mother as a 
feeble-minded individual of the first water. What 
we read in contemporary fi6lion in this realistic 
age is apt to be photographed from existing con- 
ditions. The newly created species of our homes 
does not always reveal these sentiments in so 
many words; indeed she is usually disposed to 
conceal from her parents as far as possible their 
own shortcomings, believing often, with ostrich- 
like complacency, that they have no idea what 
she really thinks of them. Quite frequently late 
in life it dawns upon her that they were not such 
complete imbeciles as she had adjudged them, 
and she revises her convictions accordingly. But 
often she lives superior to the end. 

It would be an excellent thing for the Ameri- 
can girl if her eyes could be definitely opened to 
the fad that her parents, particularly her mother, 
are much more clever than she supposes, and that 
they are really her best counsellors. But on the 
other hand, is not the American mother herself 

[ 219 ] 



The Art of Living 

chiefly responsible for this attitude of loving con- 
tempt and sweet but unfilial condescension on 
the part of her own flesh and blood ? It some- 
times seems as though we had fallen vidims to 
our reluctance to thwart our children in any way 
lest we should destroy their love for us. But is 
it much preferable to be loved devotedly as fool- 
ish, weak, and amiable old things, than to be 
feared a little as individuals capable of exercising 
authority and having opinions of our own ? 

This yielding, self-abnegating tendency on the 
part of parents, and consequent filial tyranny, are 
especially conspicuous in the case of that arch 
despot, the summer girl. I admit her fascination 
unreservedly, and am willing to concede that she 
has run the gauntlet of criticism hurled at her by 
the effete civilizations with an unblemished repu- 
tation. Though she may have become a little 
more conservative and conventional out of defer- 
ence to good taste, she is still able to be lost in 
caves or stranded on islands with any young man 
of her acquaintance without bringing a blush to 
any cheek except that of the horror-stricken for- 
eigner. But having admitted this, I am obliged 
to charge her with trampling on the prostrate 
form of her mother from the first of July to the 

[ 220 ] 



The Summer Problem 

first of Od:ober. She does so to a certain extent 
the year round, but the summer is the crowning 
season of her despotism. 

The first concern of the American father and 
mother in making plans for the summer is to go 
to some place which the children will like, and 
the summer girl in particular. This is natural and 
in keeping with the unselfish devotion shown by 
the present generation of parents toward their 
children. But it is one thing to endeavor to se- 
led: a place which will be satisfadlory to one's 
eighteen-year-old daughter and another to be 
sweetly hedlored by that talented young woman 
into going to some place selected by her of which 
you entirely disapprove. And just here it is that 
the American mother almost seems to be con- 
victed of the feebleness of intelled: ascribed to 
her by the newly created species. You, the father, 
are just screwing your courage up to say that you 
will be blessed if you will go to a summer hotel 
at Narragansett Pier (or wherever it is), when 
your wife, who has been cowed or cajoled by the 
despot in the interim, flops completely, as the 
saying is, and joins an almost tearful support to 
the summer girl's petition. And there you are. 
What are you to do ? Daughter and mother, the 

[ 221 ] 



The Art of Living 

apple of your eye and the angel of your heart, 
leagued against you. Resistence becomes impos- 
sible, unless you are ready to incur the reputa- 
tion of being a stony-hearted old curmudgeon. 
The summer girl invariably wishes to go where 
it is gay. Her idea of enjoyment does not admit 
domesticity and peaceful relaxation. She craves 
to be adively amused, if not blissfully excited. 
It is not strange that the tastes and sentiments of 
young persons from seventeen to twenty-three 
should differ considerably from those of mothers 
and fathers from forty to fifty, and it speaks well 
for the intelligence and unselfishness of middle- 
aged parents and guardians in this country that 
they so promptly recognize the legitimate claims 
of youth, and even are eager to give young peo- 
ple a chance to enjoy themselves before the cares 
of life hedge them in. But have we not gone to 
the other extreme ? Is it meet that we should re- 
gard ourselves as moribund at fifty, and sacrifice 
all our own comfort and happiness in order to let 
a young girl have her head, and lead a life in 
summer of which we heartily disapprove ? It is 
not an exaggeration to state that there is a grow- 
ing disposition on the part of the rising hordes 
of young men and girls to regard any one in 

[ 222 ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



society over thirty-five as a fossil and an encum- 
brance, for whom, in a social sense, the grave is 
yawning. It is not uncommon to hear a comely 
matron of forty described as a frump by a youth 
scarcely out of his teens, and every old gentleman 
of thirty-nine has experienced the tad:less pity 
which fashionable maidens under twenty-one en- 
deavor to conceal in the presence of his senility. 
The summer girl is generally a young person 
who has been a winter girl for nine months. I 
am quite aware that some girls are much more 
effedlive in summer than at any other season, and 
it may be that in certain cases they appear to so 
little advantage in winter that to attempt to grat- 
ify parental inclinations at their expense would 
be rank unkindness. But it is safe to allege that 
the average summer girl in this country has been 
doing all she ought to do in the way of dancing, 
prancing, gadding, going, working, and generally 
spending her vital powers in the autumn, winter, 
and spring immediately preceding, and conse- 
quently when summer comes needs, quite as 
much as her parents, physical, mental, and moral 
ozone. But what does she prefer to do ? Whither 
is she bent on leading her father by the nose 
with the assistance of her mother ? To various 

[ 223 ] 



The Art of Living 

places, according to her special prediledlion, and 
the farthest limit of the parental purse. If pos- 
sible, to one of the gayest watering-places, where 
she hopes to bathe, play tennis, walk, talk, and 
drive during the day ; paddle, stroll, or sit out dur- 
ing the evening, and dance until twelve o'clock 
at night two or three times a week. Else to some 
much-advertised mountain catarad: or lake re- 
sort, to lead a stagnant hotel corridor and piazza 
life, in the fond hope of seeing the vividly im- 
agined Him alight from the stage-coach some 
Saturday night. Meanwhile she is one of three- 
score forlorn girls who haunt the office and make 
eyes at the hotel clerk. The summer girl has a 
mania for the summer hotel. It seems to open 
to her radiant possibilities. She kindles at the 
mention of a hop in August, and if she is musi- 
cal, the tinkle of her piano playing reverberates 
through the house all day until the other board- 
ers are driven nearly crazy. In the gloaming 
after supper she flits off from the house with her 
best young man of the moment, and presently 
her mother is heard bleating along the piazza, 
"My Dorothy has gone without her shawl, and 
will catch her death a cold." 

And so it goes all summer. When autumn 
[ 224 ] 



The Summer Proble 



m 



comes and the leaf is about to fall, and Dorothy 
returns to town, what has she to show for it ? 
A little tan and a callous heart, a promised win- 
ter correspondence with the hotel clerk, new 
slang, some knack at banjo-playing, and consid- 
erable uncertainty in her mind as to whom she is 
engaged to, or whether she is engaged at all. 
And like as not the dodor is sent for to build 
her up for the winter with cod-liver oil and qui- 
nine. There is too much ozone at some of these 
summer hotels. 

We cannot hope to do away wholly with either 
the summer hotel or the fashionable watering- 
place by the assertion of parental authority. Such 
an endeavor, indeed, would on the whole be an 
unjust as well as fruitless piece of virtue. The 
delightful comradeship between young men and 
young women, which is one of our national pro- 
ducts, is typified most saliently by the summer 
girl and her attendant swains. Naturally she 
wishes to go to some place where swains are apt 
to congregate; and the swain is always in search 
of her. Moreover, the summer hotel must con- 
tinue to be the summer home of thousands who, 
for one reason or another, have no cottage or 
abandoned farm. My plea is still the same, how- 

[ 2^5 ] 



The Art of Living 

ever. Why, now that the negro slave is free, and 
the workingman is being legislated into peace 
and plenty, and the wrongs of other women are 
being righted, should not the American mother 
try to burst her bonds ? It would be a much 
more simple matter than it seems, for, after all, 
she has her own blood in her veins, and she has 
only to remember what a dogmatic person she 
herself was in the days of her youth. If the code 
of fathers and mothers, instead of that of girls 
and boys, were in force at our summer hotels 
and watering-places, a very different state of af- 
fairs would soon exist; and that, too, without 
undue interference with that inherent, cherished, 
and unalienable right of the American daughter, 
the maiden's choice. We must not forget that 
though our civilization boasts the free exercise 
of the maiden's choice as one of the brightest 
jewels in the crown of republican liberties, the 
crowded condition of our divorce courts forbids 
us to be too demonstrative in our self-satisfaction. 
It would be dire, indeed, to bore the young 
person, especially the summer girl. But does it 
necessarily follow that a summer home or a sum- 
mer life indicated by the parent would induce 
such a disastrous result ? I am advising neither a 

[ 226 ] 



The Summer Problem 

dungeon, a convent, nor some excruciatingly 
dull spot to which no fascinating youth is likely 
to penetrate. Verily, even the crowded bathing 
beach may not corrupt, provided that wise mo- 
therly control and companionship point out the 
dangers and proted: the forming soul, mind, and 
manners, instead of allowing them to be dis- 
torted and poisoned by the ups and downs of 
promiscuous amatory summer guerilla warfare. 
But may it not happen, when the maternal foot 
is once firmly put down, that the summer girl 
will not be so easily bored as she or her mother 
fears, and will even be grateful for protedion 
against her own ignorance and inexperience ? 
Boating, sketching, riding, reading, bicycling, 
travel, sewing, and photography are pastimes 
which ought not to bore her, and would surely 
leave her more refreshed in the autumn than con- 
tinuous gadding, dancing, and flirtation. To be a 
member of a small, pleasant colony, where the 
days are passed simply and lazily, yet interest- 
ingly; where the finer senses are constantly ap- 
pealed to by the beauties of nature and the 
healthful character of one's occupations, is a 
form of exile which many a summer girl would 
accommodate herself to gladly if she only un- 

[ 227 ] 



The Art of Living 

derstood what it was like, and understood, more- 
over, that the seledion of a summer programme 
had ceased to be one of her prerogatives. A de- 
termined man who wishes to marry will discover 
the objed: of his affedions on an abandoned farm 
or in the heart of the Maine woods, if he is 
worth his salt. In these days of many yachts and 
bicycles true love can travel rapidly, and there 
is no occasion for marriageable girls to seled: 
courting-grounds where their lovers can have 
close at hand a Casino and other conveniences, 
including the opportunity to flirt with their next 
best Dulcineas. 

If the summer-time is the time in which to re- 
cuperate and lie fallow, why should we have so 
many summer schools ? After the grand panjan- 
drum of Commencement exercises at the col- 
leges is over, there ought to be a pause in the 
intelledual adivity of the nation for at least sixty 
days; yet there seems to be a considerable body 
of men and women who, in spite of the fad: that 
they exercise their brains vigorously during the 
rest of the year, insist on mental gymnastics when 
the thermometer is in the eighties. These schools 
— chiefly assemblies in the name of the ologies 
and osophies — bring together more or less peo- 

[ 228 ] 



T'h e Summer P r o b le 



m 



pie more or less learned, from all over the coun- 
try, to talk at one another and read papers. 

Judging merely from the newspaper accounts 
of their proceedings, it is almost invariably im- 
possible to discover the exa6l meaning of any- 
thing which is uttered, but this may be due to 
the absence of the regular reporters on their an- 
nual vacations, and the consequent delegation 
to tyros of the difficult duty in question. But 
even assuming that the utterances of the sum- 
mer schools are both intelligible and stimulating, 
would not the serious-minded men and women 
concerned in them be better off lying in a ham- 
mock under a wide-spreading beech-tree, or, if 
this seems too relaxing an occupation, watching 
the bathers at Narragansett Pier ? There is wis- 
dom sometimes in sending young and very ac- 
tive boys to school for about an hour a day in 
summer, in order chiefly to know where they 
are and to prevent them from running their legs 
off; but with this exception the mental workers 
in this country, male and female, young and old, 
can afford to close their text-books with a bang 
on July I St, and not peep at them again until 
September. Philosophy in August has much the 
flavor of asparagus in January. 

[ 229 ] 




The Case of Man. 
I. 

NOT inconsiderable portion of 
the women of the United States 
is inclined to regard man as a 
necessary evil. Their point of 
view is that he is here, and there- 
fore is likely, for the present at least, to remain 
a formidable figure in human affairs, but that his 
ways are not their ways, that they disapprove of 
them and him, and that they intend to work out 
their lives and salvation as independently of him 
as possible. What man in the flush and prime 
of life has not been made conscious of this atti- 
tude of the modern woman ? She is constantly 
passing us in the street with the manner of one 
haughtily and supremely indifferent. There are 
women enough still who look patterns of mod- 
esty, and yet let us feel at the same time that we 
are more or less an objed: of interest to them; 
but this particular type sails by in her trig and 
often stylish costume with the air not merely of 
not seeing us, but of wishing to ignore us. Her 
compressed lips suggest a judgment; a judgment 
born of meditated convidlion which leaves no 

[ 230 ] 



The Case of Man 



hope of reconsideration or exception. "You are 
all substantially alike/' she seems to say, "and 
we have had enough of you. Go your ways and 
we will go ours." 

The Mecca of the modern woman's hopes, as 
indicated by this point of view, would appear to 
be the ultimate disappearance of man from the 
face of the earth after the manner of the masto- 
don and other brutes. Nor are her hopes balked 
by physiological barriers. She is prepared to ad- 
mit that it is not obvious, as yet, how girls alone 
are to be generated and boy babies given the cold 
maternal shoulder; but she trusts to science and 
the long results of time for a vidory which will 
eliminate sexual relations and all their attendant 
perplexities and tragedies from the theatre of 
human life. 

We are not so sanguine as she that the king- 
dom of heaven is to be brought to pass in any so 
simple and purely feminine a fashion. That is, 
we men. Perhaps we are fatuous, but we see no 
reason to doubt that sexual relations will con- 
tinue to the crack of doom, in spite of the per- 
plexities and tragedies consequent upon them; 
and moreover, that man will continue to thrive 
like a young bay-tree, even though she contin- 

C 231 ] 



The Art of Living 

ues to wear a chip on her tailor-made shoulder. 
And yet at the same time we feel sober. It is not 
pleasant to be regarded as brutes and to have 
judgment passed upon us by otherwise attractive 
women. It behooves us to scratch our heads 
and ask ourselves if we can possibly merit the 
haughty indifference and thinly disguised con- 
tempt which is entertained toward us. To be 
weighed in the balance and found wanting by a 
serene and beautiful young person is a far from 
agreeable experience. There must be something 
wrong with us, and if so, what is it ? 

Of course there was a time — and not so very 
long ago — when men were tyrants and kept 
women under. Nowadays the only thing denied 
them in polite circles is to whisk around by 
themselves after dark, and plenty of them do 
that. The law is giving them, with both hands, 
almost everything they ask for nearly as rapidly 
as existing inequalities are pointed out, and the 
right of suffrage is withheld from them only be- 
cause the majority of women are still averse to 
exercising it. Man, the tyrant and highwayman, 
has thrown up his arms and is allowing woman 
to pick his pockets. He is not willing to have 
her bore a hole in his upper lip, and drag him 

[ 232 ] 



"The Case of Man 



behind her with a rope, but he is disposed to 
consent to any reasonable legislative changes 
which she desires to have made, short of those 
which would involve masculine disfigurement or 
depreciation. It certainly cannot be his bullying 
qualities which have attracted her disdain, for he 
has given in. If woman to-day finds that the law 
discriminates unjustly between her and man, she 
has merely to ask for relief in sufficient numbers 
to show that she is not the tool of designing 
members of her own sex, in order to obtain it. 
Under the spur of these reflections I consulted 
my wife by way of obtaining light on this pro- 
blem. " Barbara, why is it that modern women of 
a certain type are so sniffy toward men ? You 
know what I mean; they speak to us, of course, 
and tolerate us, and they love us individually 
as husbands and fathers; but instead of counting 
for everything, as we once did, we don't seem to 
count for anything unless it be dollars and cents. 
It is n't merely that you all talk so fast and have 
so much to say without regard to us that we often 
feel left out in the cold, and even hurt, but there 
is a stern, relentless look on some of your faces 
which makes us feel as though we had stolen the 
Holy Grail. You must have noticed it." 

[ nz ] 



The Art of Living 

"Oh, yes," said Barbara, with a smile. "It 
does n't mean very much. Of course times are 
not what they were. Man used to be a demigod, 
now he is only a " 

Barbara hesitated for a word, so I suggested, 
"Only a bank." 

"Let us say only a man. Only a man in the 
eyes of refle6tive womanhood. We have caught 
up and are beginning to think for ourselves. You 
can't exped: us to hang on your every word and 
to fall down and worship you without reserva- 
tion as we once did. Man used to be woman's 
whole existence, often to her infinite sorrow, and 
now he is only part of it, just as she is only a 
part of his. You go to your clubs; we go to ours; 
and while you are playing cards we read or listen 
to papers, some of which are not intelligible to 
man. But we love you still, even though we have 
ceased to worship you. There are a few, I admit, 
who would like to do away with you altogether; 
but they are extremists — in every revolution, 
you know, there are fanatics and unreasonable 
persons — but the vast majority of us have a ten- 
der spot for you in our hearts, and regard your 
case in sorrow rather than in anger — and as 
probably not hopeless." 

[ ^34 ] 



The Case of Man 



"What is the matter with us V 

"Oh, everything. You are a failure fundamen- 
tally. To begin with, your theory of Hfe is found- 
ed on compromise. We women — the modern 
woman — abhor compromise." 

Although it was obvious that Barbara was try- 
ing to tease me, I realized from her expression 
that she intended to deal my sex a crucial stab 
by the word compromise. I must confess that I 
felt just a little uncomfortable under the white 
light of scorn which radiated from her eyes, while 
her general air reminded me for the first time 
disagreeably of the type of modern woman to 
whom I had referred. 

"The world progresses by compromise," I 
replied, sententiously. 

"Yes, like a snail." 

"Otherwise it would stand still. A man thinks 
so and so ; another man thinks precisely opposite ; 
they meet each other half-way and so much is 
gained." 

"Oh, I know how they do. A man who stands 
for a principle meets another man ; they argue 
and bluster for a few minutes, and presently they 
sit down and have something to eat or drink, and 
by the time they separate the man who stands 

[ "^ZS 3 



The Art of Living 

for a principle has sacrificed all there is of it, ex- 
cept a tiny scrap or shred, in order not to in- 
commode the man who has no principles at all ; 
and what is almost worse, they part seemingly 
bosom friends and are apt to exchange rhetori- 
cal protestations of mutual esteem. The modern 
woman has no patience with such a way of doing 
things." 

"I suppose," said I, "that two modern women 
under similar circumstances would tear each other 
all to pieces ; there would be nothing to eat or 
drink, except possibly tea and wafers, and the 
floor would be covered with fragments of skin, 
hair, and clothing. When they separated one 
would be dead and the other maimed for life, and 
the principle for which the vi6lor stood would 
be set back about a century and a half." 

Barbara winced a little, but she said, " What 
have you men accomplished all these years by 
your everlasting compromises \ If you were really 
in earnest to solve the liquor problem, and the 
social evil, as you call it, and all the other 
abuses which exist in civilized and uncivilized 
society, you would certainly have been able to do 
more than you have. You have had free scope ; 
we have n't been consulted ; we have stood aside 

[ 236 ] 



The Case of Ma 



n 



and let you have your innings ; now we merely 
wish to see what we can do. We shall make mis- 
takes I dare say ; even one or two of us may be 
torn to pieces or maimed for life ; but the mod- 
ern woman feels that she has the courage of her 
convidlions and that she does not intend to let 
herself be thwarted or cajoled by masculine theo- 
ries. That accounts largely for our apparent snif- 
finess. I say ^ apparent,' because we are not really 
at bottom so contemptuous as we seem — even 
the worst of us. I suppose you are right in de- 
claring that the proud, superior, and beautiful 
young person of the present day is a little dis- 
dainful. But even she is less severe than she 
looks. She is simply a nineteenth-century Joan 
of Arc protesting against the man of the world 
and his works, asking to be allowed to lead her 
life without molestation from him in a shrine of 
her own tasteful yet simple construction — rooms 
or a room where she can practise her calling, fol- 
low her tastes, ambitions, or hobbies, pursue her 
charities, and amuse herself without being ac- 
countable to him. She wishes him to understand 
that, though she is attractive, she does not mean 
to be seduced or to be worried into matrimony 
against her will, and that she intends to use her 

[ 237 ] 



The Art of Living 

earnings and her property to pay her own bills 
and provide for her own gratification, instead of 
to defray the debts of her vicious or easy-going 
male relations or admirers. There is really a long 
back account to settle, so it is not surprising that 
the pendulum should swing a little too far the 
other way. Of course she is wrong ; woman can 
no more live wholly independent of man than 
he of her — and you know what a helpless being 
he would be without her — and the modern wo- 
man is bound to recognize, sooner or later, that 
the sympathetic companionship of women with 
men is the only basis of true social progress. 
Sexual affinity is stronger than the constitutions 
of all the women's clubs combined, as eight out 
of ten young modern women discover to their 
cost, or rather to their happiness, sooner or later. 
Some brute of a man breaks into the shrine, and 
before she knows it she is wheeling a baby car- 
riage. Even the novelist, with his or her fertile 
invention, has failed to discover any really sat- 
isfactory ending for the independent, disdainful 
heroine but marriage or the grave. Spinsterhood, 
even when illumined by a career, is a worthy and 
respedable lot, but not alluring.*' 

It was something to be assured by my wife 

[ 238 ] 



T*he Case of Man 

that the modern woman does not purpose to 
abolish either maternity or men, and that, so to 
speak, her bark is worse than her bite. Barbara 
belongs to a woman^s club, so she must know. 
We men are in such a nervous state, as a result 
of what Barbara calls the revolution, that very 
likely we are unduly sensitive and suspicious, and 
allow our imaginations to fly off at a tangent. 
Very likely, too, we are disposed to be a trifle ir- 
ritable, for when one has been accustomed for 
long to sit on or club a person (literally or meta- 
phorically, according to one's social status) when 
she happens to express sentiments or opinions 
contrary to ours, it must needs take time to get 
used to the idea that she is really an equal, and 
to adjust one's ratiocinations to suit. But even 
accepting as true the assurance that the forbid- 
ding air of the modern woman does not mean 
much, and that she loves us still though she has 
ceased to worship us, we have Barbara's word for 
it, too, that the modern woman thinks we have 
made a mess of it and that man is a failure fun- 
damentally. Love without resped; ! Sorrow rather 
than anger ! It sobers one ; it saddens one. For 
we must admit that man has had free scope and 
a long period in which to make the most of him- 

[ 239 ] 



The Art of Living 

self; and woman has not, which precludes us from 
answering back, as it were, which is always more 
or less of a consolation when one is brought to 
bay. 

A tendency to compromise is certainly one of 
man's charadleristics. Barbara has referred to it 
as a salient fault — a vice, and perhaps it is, 
though it is writ large in the annals of civiliza- 
tion as conducted by man. We must at least 
agree that it is not woman's way, and that she 
experts to do without it when we are no more or 
are less than we are now. Probably we have been 
and are too easy-going, and no one will deny that 
one ought at all times to have the courage of 
one's convidions, even in midsummer and on 
purely social occasions; nevertheless it would 
have been trying to the nervous system and con- 
ducive to the continuance and increase of stand- 
ing armies, had we favored the policy of shooting 
at sight those whose views on the temperance 
question differed from ours, or of telling the host 
at whose house we had passed the evening that 
we had been bored to death. 

If one runs over in his mind the Madame 
Tussaud Gallery of masculine types, he cannot 
fail to acknowledge that, in our capacity of lords 

[ 240 ] 



The Case of Man 



of creation and viceregents of Providence, we 
have produced and perpetuated a number of 
sorry specimens. First in the list stands the so- 
called man of the world, on account of whom in 
particular, according to Barbara, the nineteenth- 
century Joan of Arc looks askance at our sex. 
He is an old stager; he dates back very nearly, 
if not completely, to the garden of Eden, and he 
has always been a bugbear to woman. It is not 
necessary to describe him ; he has ever stood for 
simply carnal interests and appetites, whether as 
a satyr, a voluptuary, a wine-bibber, a glutton, 
a miser, an idler, or a mere pleasure-seeker. If all 
the human industries which have owed and still 
owe their prosperity to his propensities were to 
be obliterated, there would be a large array of 
unemployed in the morning but a healthier 
world. The bully, or prevailer by brute force, the 
snob, the cynic, the parasite, the trimmer, and 
the conceited egotist are others prominent in the 
category, without regard to criminals and unvar- 
nished offenders against whose noxious behavior 
men have protedled themselves by positive law. 
On the other hand, our gallery of past types 
has many figures of which we have a right to be 
proud. Unfortunately we are barred again from 

[ HI ] 



The Art of Living 

comparison or answering back by the taunt that 
woman has never had a chance; nevertheless we 
may claim for what it is worth that, in the realm 
of intelled: or of the spirit, there have been no 
women who have soared so high; seers, poets, 
law-givers, unfolders of nature's secrets, adminis- 
trators of affairs, healers and scholars have been 
chiefly or solely men. If some of us have frater- 
nized with Belial, others have walked, or sought 
to walk, with God no less genuinely and fervently 
than any woman who ever breathed. In the mat- 
ter of spirituality, indeed, some of us in the past 
having been led to believe that women knew 
more about the affairs of the other world than 
men, sought to cultivate the spindle-legged, 
thin-chested, pale, anaemic Christian as the type 
of humanity most acceptable to God and ser- 
viceable to society; but we have gone back to 
the bishop of sturdy frame and a reasonably 
healthy appetite as a more desirable mediator 
between ourselves and heaven. 

From the standpoint of our present inquiry, 
what man in his various types has been in the 
past is less pertinent than what he is at present. 
To begin with, certainly the modern man is not 
a picturesque figure. He no longer appeals to the 

[ 242 ] 



The Case of Man 



feminine or any eye by virtue of imposing ap- 
parel or accoutrements. Foreign army officers 
and servants in livery are almost the only males 
who have not exchanged plumage for sober 
woollens, tweeds, or serges, and the varied re- 
splendent materials and colors by means of 
which men used to distinguish themselves from 
one another and to negative their evil-doings in 
the eyes of women have been discarded. All men 
but one look alike to any woman, and even that 
one is liable to be confounded with the rest of 
mankind when he is more than half a block away. 
Nor is the homogeneous tendency limited to 
clothes ; it includes manners, morals, and point 
of view. The extreme types approximate each 
other much more closely than formerly, and apart 
from criminals and deliberately evil-minded per- 
sons, women have some ground for their insinu- 
ation that we are all pretty much alike. Let it be 
said that this effedl is in one sense a feather in 
our caps. The nineteenth-century Joan of Arc 
to the contrary notwithstanding, the modern man 
of the world is a manifest improvement on his 
predecessor. He is no longer to be found under 
the table after dinner as a social matter of course, 
and three-bottles-to-a-guest festivities have 

[ 243 ] 



The Art of JLiviiig 

ceased to be an aristocratic fundtion. Though on 
occasions still he will fumble with the latch-key, 
he mounts the stairs very little, if at all, after 
midnight with the nonchalance of self-congratu- 
latory sobriety, and all those dire scenes of wo- 
man on the staircase with a lighted candle looking 
down at her prostrate lord and master belong to 
an almost dim past. True it may be that the man 
of the world fears God no more than formerly, 
but he has learned to have a wholesome dread 
of Bright's disease, the insane asylum, and those 
varied forms of sudden and premature death 
which are included under the reportorial head 
of heart-failure. Mere brutishness in its various 
forms is less apparent. The coarse materialist still 
swaggers in public places and impudently puffs 
a cigar in the face of modesty, but he serves no 
longer as a model for envious contemporaries or 
an objed; of hero-worship to the rising genera- 
tion. Good taste, if nothing better, has checked 
man's tendencies to make a beast of himself in 
public or in private. 

Similarly, also, the type of man to whom we 
look up most proudly and confidently to-day is 
not altogether the same. The model whom we 
were urged, and whom we sought of old to imi- 

[ 244 ] 



The Case of Man 

tate, was he who wrestled with God on the 
mountain-top, without a thought of earth's 
smoke and din and wretchedness. Human life 
and its joys and interests served for him as a 
homily on vanity, or was regarded as a degra- 
dation in comparison with the revelations ob- 
tained by the priest, poet, or devotee of culture 
through the vista of aspiring imagination or zeal. 
The conservative man of affairs — vigorous, far- 
seeing, keenly alive to the joys and interests of 
this life, strongly sympathetic on the humani- 
tarian side, a man of the world withal in a rea- 
sonable sense — has impressed his personality on 
modern society more successfully than any other 
type. The priest who cares not for his fellow-man, 
the poet whose dreams and visions include no 
human interest or passion, the devotee of culture 
who refines merely to refine, have been super- 
seded, and in their stead we have the man of the 
world who is interested in the world and for the 
world. 

This change In the avowed aims and aspira- 
tions of man has not been without certain appar- 
ently melancholy results and manifestations of 
which society is feeling the effed: at present, and 
which if allowed to prevail too far will undo us. 

[ 245 ] 



The Art of Living 

The removal of the gaze of the priest, poet, and 
devotee of culture from the stars in contempt of 
earth, and the substitution of earth-gazing as a 
method for understanding the stars, has seemed 
to cast a damper on human imagination and has 
thereby caused many excellent women and some 
men to weep. If materialism be the science of 
trying to get the most out of this life, this is a 
material age ; but at the same time it should be 
remembered that man in this age has ceased for 
the first time to be either a hypocrite or a fool. 
Undoubtedly the process of becoming both sin- 
cere and sensible, especially as it has substituted 
concern for the ignorant, the oppressed, and the 
vicious of this earth about whom we know next 
to nothing, in place of Pre-Raphaelite heavenly 
choirs, alabaster halls, and saints in glory about 
whom we thought we knew everything, has been 
a little trying for the rest of us as well as for the 
priests, poets, and devotees of culture. But the 
women must not be discouraged ; we shall grow 
to the situation in time, and even the poets, who 
seem to be most down in the mouth at present, 
will sooner or later find a fresh well of inspiration 
by learning to study the refle6lion of the stars on 
the earth instead of looking diredly at them. Let 

[ 246 ] 



The Case of Ma 



n 



them be patient, though it be to death, and some 
day through others, if not through themselves, 
the immortal verse will flow and the immortal 
lyre sound again. 

Undoubtedly the modern man is at present a 
rather trying person to woman, for woman would 
have been glad, now that she is coming into 
her kingdom, to have him more of a crusader 
and less of a philosopher. To behold him lack- 
ing in piduresqueness and a philosopher ad- 
dicted to compromise into the bargain is almost 
irritating to her, and she has certainly some 
ground for criticism. The man who sits oppo- 
site to her at the breakfast-table, even after he 
has overcome conservative fears of nothing to 
live on and dawdled into matrimony, is a lova- 
ble but not especially exciting person. He eats, 
works, and sleeps, does most of the things which 
he ought to do and leaves undone a commenda- 
ble number of the things which he ought not to 
do, and is a rather respedtable member of society 
of the machine-made order. He works very hard 
to supply her with money; he is kind to her and 
the children; he gives her her head, as he calls 
it; and he acquiesces pleasantly enough in the 
social plans which she entertains for herself and 

[ 247 ] 



The Art of Living 

him, and ordinarily he is sleepy in the evening. 
Indeed, in moments of most serious depression 
she is tempted to think of him as a superior 
choreman, a comparison which haunts her even 
in church. She would like, with one fell swoop 
of her broom, to clear the world of the social 
evil, the fruit of the grape, tobacco, and playing 
cards, to introduce drastic educational reforms 
which would, by kindergarten methods, familiar- 
ize every one on earth with art and culture, and 
to bring to pass within five, or possibly six years, 
a golden age of absolute reform inspired and es- 
tablished by woman. Life for her at present 
means one vast camp of committee meetings, 
varied only by frequent cups of tea; and that 
steaming beverage continues prominent in her 
radiant vision of the coming millennium. No 
wonder it disconcerts and annoys her to find so 
comparatively little enthusiastic confidence in 
the immediate success of her fell swoop, and to 
have her pathway blocked by grave or lazy ifs 
and buts and by cold contradictions of fad:. No 
wonder she abhors compromise; no wonder she 
regards the man who goes on using tobacco and 
playing cards and drinking things stronger than 
tea as an inert and soulless creature. 

[ 248 ] 



The Case of Ma 



n 



Yet smile as we may at the dull, sorry place 
the world would be were the golden age of her 
intention to come upon us over night like a cold 
wave, is she not justified in regarding the aver- 
age custom-made man of the day as a highly 
respectable, well-to-do choreman who earns fair 
wages and goes to sleep at night contented with 
a good meal and a pipe ? Is he not machine- 
made ? Sincere and wise as he is, now that his 
gaze is fixed on the needs of earth, has he not 
the philosophy of hygienic comfort and easy- 
going conservative materialism so completely on 
the brain that he is in danger of becoming ordi- 
nary instead of just a little lower than the an- 
gels ? Let us consider him from this point of 
view more in detail. 



[ 249 ] 



The Case of Man. 
II. 

^HE young man of the present era 

'T i^3? ^^ ^^^ twenty-first birthday is apt to 

^^ find himself in a very prudent and 

1^ conservative atmosphere. The dif- 
ficulties of getting on are explained to him ; he 
is properly assured that, though there is plenty 
of room on the top benches, the occupations 
and professions are crowded, if not overcrowded, 
and that he must buckle down if he would suc- 
ceed. It is obvious to him that the field of ad- 
venture and fortune-seeking in foreign or strange 
places is pradlically exhausted. It is open to him, 
to be sure, to go to the North Pole in search of 
some one already there, or to study in a cage in 
the jungles of Africa the linguistic value of the 
howls and chatterings of wild animals; but these 
are manifestly poor pickings compared with the 
opportunities of the past when a considerable 
portion of the globe was still uninvestigated soil, 
and a reputation or treasure-trove was the tol- 
erably frequent reward of leaving the rut of civi- 
lized life. It is plainly pointed out to him, too, 
that to be florid is regarded as almost a mental 

[ ^50 ] 



The Case of Man 

weakness in intelledual or progressive circles. 
He sees the lawyer who makes use of metaphor, 
bombast, and the other arts of oratory, which 
used to captivate and convince, distanced in the 
race for eminence by him who employs a suc- 
cind:, dispassionate, and almost colloquial form 
of statement. He recognizes that in every de- 
partment of human adivity, from the investiga- 
tion of disease-germs to the management of rail- 
roads, steady, undemonstrative marshallings of 
fad, and cautious, unemotional dedudion there- 
from are considered the scientific and only ap- 
propriate method. He knows that the expression 
of unusual or erratic ideas will expose him to the 
stigma of being a crank, a reputation which, once 
acquired, sticks like pitch, and that the betrayal 
of sentiment will induce conservative people to 
put him on the suspeded list. 

All this is imbibed by him as it should be, in the 
interest of sincerity and sense. Under the sobering 
restraint of it the young man begins to make his 
way with enthusiasm and energy, but circum- 
spedly and deliberately. He mistrusts everything 
that he cannot pick to pieces on the spot and ana- 
lyze, and though he is willing to be amused, be- 
guiled, or even temporarily inspired by appeals to 

[251 ] 



The Art of Living 

his imagination or emotions, he puts his doubts or 
qualms aside next morning at the behest of busi- 
ness. He wishes to get on. He is determined not 
to allow anything to interfere with that, and he 
understands that that is to be accomplished partly 
by hard work and partly by becoming a good fel- 
low and showing common-sense. This is excellent 
reasoning until one examines too closely what is 
expedted of him as a good fellow, and what is re- 
quired of him in the name of common-sense. 

There have been good fellows in every age, 
and some of them have been tough specimens. 
Our good fellow is almost highly respedable. He 
wishes to live as long as he can, and to let others 
live as long as they can. His patron saints are 
his do6tor, his bank account, prudence, and gen- 
eral toleration. If he were obliged to specify the 
vice not covered by the statute law which he 
most abhors, he would probably name slopping 
over. He aims to be genial, sympathetic, and 
knowing, but not obtrusively so, and he is be- 
comingly suspicious and reticent regarding every- 
thing which cannot be demonstrated on a chart 
like an international yacht-race or a medical op- 
eration. He is quietly and moderately licentious, 
and justifies himself satisfadorily but mournfully 

[ 252 ] 



The Case of Man 



on hygienic grounds or on the plea of masculine 
inevitability. He works hard, if he has to, for he 
wishes to live comfortably by the time he is forty, 
and comfort means, as it ought to mean, an attrac- 
tive wife, an attractive establishment, and an at- 
tractive income. An imprudent marriage seems 
to him one of the most egregious forms of slop- 
ping over. If he hears that two of his contem- 
poraries are engaged, his first inquiry is, " What 
have they to live on ? '* and if the answer is un- 
satisfactory, they fall a peg or two in his estima- 
tion, and he is likely, the next time he feels mel- 
low after dinner, to descant on the impropriety 
of bringing children into the world who may be 
left penniless orphans. If he falls in love himself 
before he feels that his pecuniary position war- 
rants it, he tries to shake out the arrow, and, if 
that fails, he cuts it out deliberately under antisep- 
tic treatment to avoid blood-poisoning. All our 
large cities are full of young men who have un- 
dergone this operation. To lose one's vermiform 
appendix is a perilous yet blessed experience; but 
this trifling with the human heart, however scien- 
tific the excision, can scarcely be regarded as bene- 
ficial unless we are to assume that it, like the 
fashionable sac, has become rudimentary. 

[ '^^Z ] 



The Art of Living 

We see a great many allusions in our comic 
and satiric weeklies to marrying for money, but 
the good fellow of the best type ordinarily dis- 
dains such a proceeding. His self-resped: is not 
offended but hugely gratified if the young wo- 
man with whom he intends to ally himself would 
be able immediately or prospedlively to contri- 
bute a million or so to the domestic purse; but 
he would regard a deliberate sale of himself for 
cash as a dirty piece of business. On the other 
hand, he is very business-like where his heart is 
engaged, and is careful not to let his emotions or 
fancy get the better of him until he can see his 
ship — and a well-freighted one at that — on the 
near horizon. And what is to become of the 
young woman in the meantime ? To let conceal- 
ment, like a worm in the bud, feed on a damask 
cheek may be more fatal than masculine arrow 
extradion; for woman, less scientific in her me- 
thods than man, is less able to avoid blood-poi- 
soning. She doses herself, probably, with anti- 
pyrine, burns her Emerson and her Tennyson, 
and after a period of nervous prostration devotes 
herself to charity toward the world at large with 
the exception of all good fellows. 

The good fellow after he marries continues 

[ ^54 ] 



The Case of Man 

to be a good fellow. He adapts himself to the 
humanitarian necessities of the situation; he be- 
comes fond and domestic, almost oppressively 
so, and he is eager to indulge the slightest wish 
or fancy of his mate, provided it be within the 
bounds of easy-going rationalism. The conjugal 
pliability of the American husband is a well- 
recognized original feature of our institutions, 
nevertheless he is apt to develop kinks unless he 
be allowed to be indulgent and companionable 
in his own way. He works harder than ever, and 
she for whose sake he is ostensibly toiling is en- 
couraged to make herself fetching and him com- 
fortable as progressively as his income will per- 
mit. When the toil of the week is over he looks 
for his reward in the form of a Welsh-rarebit 
with theatrical celebrities, a little game of poker 
within his means, or, if he be musical, a small 
gathering of friends to sing or play, if possible 
in a so-called Bohemian spirit. It irks him to 
stand very upright or to converse for long, 
whether in masculine or feminine society. He 
likes to sprawl and to be entertained with the 
latest bit of humor, but he is willing, on a plea- 
sant Sunday or holiday, to take exercise in order 
to perspire freely, and then to lie at ease under 



The Art of Living 

a tree or a bank, pleasantly refreshed with beer 
and tobaccOj and at peace with the world. He 
prefers to have her with him everywhere, except 
at the little game of poker, and is conscious of 
an aching void if she be not at hand to help him 
recuperate, philosophize, and admire the view. 
But he expedls her to do what he likes, and ex- 
perts her to like it too. 

In no age of the world has the reasoning pow- 
er of man been in better working order than at 
present. With all due respedt to the statistics 
which show that the female is beginning to out- 
strip the male in academic competitive examina- 
tions, one has only to keep his ears and eyes open 
in the workaday world in order to be convinced 
that man's purely mental processes suggest a ra- 
zor and woman's a corkscrew. The manager of 
corporate interests, the lawyer, the historian, the 
physician, the chemist, and the banker seek to- 
day to probe to the bottom that which they 
touch, and to expose to the acid of truth every 
rosy theory and sedudive prospedus. This is in 
the line of progress ; but to be satisfied with this 
alone would speedily reduce human society to 
the status of a highly organized racing stable. 
If man is to be merely a jockey, who is to ride 

[ 256 ] 



The Case of Man 



as light as he can, there is nothing to be said; 
but even on that theory is it not possible to train 
too fine ? With eloquence tabooed as savoring 
of insinceritv, with conversation as a fine art 
starved to death, with melody in music sniffed 
at as sensational, and fancy in literature con- 
demned as unscientific, with the loosening of all 
the bonds of conventionality which held civili- 
zation to the mark in matters of taste and ele- 
gance, and with a general doing away with color 
and emotion in all the practical affairs of life out 
of regard to the gospel of common-sense and ma- 
chine-made utility, the jockey now is riding prac- 
tically in his own skin. 

One has to go back but a little way in order 
to encounter among the moving spirits of society 
a radically different attitude. Unquestionably the 
temper of the present day is the result of a vig- 
orous reaction against false or maudlin sentiment, 
florid drivel, and hypocritical posturing; but cer- 
tainly a Welsh-rarebit at midnight, with easy- 
going companions, is a far remove as a spiritual 
stimulus from bread eaten in tears at the same 
hour. As has been intimated, this exaggeration 
of commonplaceness will probably right itself in 
time, but man's lack of susceptibility to influ- 

[ ^57 ] 



The Art of Living 

ences and impressions which cannot be weighed, 
fingered, smelt, looked at, or tasted, seems to 
justify at present the strictures of the modern 
woman, who, with all her bumptiousness, would 
fain continue to reverence him. Some in the van 
of feminine progress would be glad to see the 
inspiration and direction of all matters — spirit- 
ual, artistic, and social — apportioned to woman 
as her sole rightful prerogative, and consequently 
to see man become veritably a superior chore- 
man. Fortunately the world of men and women 
is likely to agree with Barbara that mutual sym- 
pathy and co-operation in these matters between 
the sexes are indispensable to the healthy devel- 
opment of human society. 

But even assuming that women were ready to 
accept the responsibility and men were willing 
to renounce it, I, for one, fear that civilization 
would find itself in a ditch rather speedily. All 
of us — we men, I mean — recognize the purify- 
ing and deterrent influence of woman as a Men- 
tor and sweet critic at our elbows. We have 
learned to depend upon her to prod us when we 
lag, and to save us from ourselves when our 
brains get the better of our hearts. But, after all, 
woman is a clinging creature. She has been used 

[ 258 ] 



The Case of Man 



to playing second fiddle; and it is quite a differ- 
ent affair to lead an orchestra. To point the way 
to spiritual or artistic progress needs, first of all, 
a clear intelled: and a firm purpose, even though 
they alone are not sufficient. Woman is essen- 
tially yielding and impressionable. At the very 
moment when the modern Joan of Arc would 
be doing her best to make the world a better 
place, would not eleven other women out of the 
dozen be giving way to the captivating plausi- 
bility of some emotional situation ? 

As an instance of what she is already capable 
of from a social point of view, now that she has 
been given her head, may well be cited the fever- 
ish eagerness with which some of the most highly 
cultivated and most subtly evolved American 
women of our large cities vie with each other for 
intimacy with artistic foreign lions of their own 
sex known to be unchaste. They seem to regard 
it as a privilege to play hostess to, or, at least, 
to be on familiar terms with, adresses, opera- 
singers, and other public chara6lers quietly but 
notoriously erotic, the plea in each case being 
that they are ready to forgive, to forget, and ig- 
nore for the sake of art and the artist. Yes, ignore 
or forget, if you choose, so far as seeing the ar- 

[ 259 ] 



The Art of Living 

tist a6t or hearing her sing in public is concerned, 
where there are no social ceremonies or inter- 
course; but let us please remember at the same 
time that even those effete nations who believe 
that the world would be a dull place without 
courtesans, insist on excluding such persons 
from their drawing-rooms. Indeed there is rea- 
son to believe that some of the artists in ques- 
tion have become hilarious, when out of sight 
of our hospitable shores, over -the wonders of 
American social usages among the pure and cul- 
tivated women. Before our young men will cease 
to sow wild oats their female relations must 
cease to run after other men's mistresses. De- 
cidedly, the modern Joan of Arc to the contrary 
notwithstanding, man cannot afford to abdicate 
just yet. But he needs to mend his hedges and 
to look after his preserves. 



[ 260] 




The Case of Woman. 
I. 

GREAT many men, who are 
sane and reasonable in other 
matters, allow themselves, on 
the slightest provocation, to be 
worked up into a fever over the 
aspirations of woman. They decline to listen to 
argument, grow red in the face, and saw the air 
with their hands, if they do not pound on the 
table, to express their views on the subjed: — 
which, by the way, are as out of date and old- 
fashioned as a pine-tree shilling. They remind 
one of the ostrich in that they seem to imagine, 
because they have buried their heads in the sand, 
nothing has happened or is happening around 
them. They confront the problem of woman's 
emancipation as though it were only just being 
broached instead of in the throes of delivery. 

Forinstance,my friend, Mr. Julius Caesar, who 
though a conservative, cautious man by nature, is 
agreeably and commendably liberal in other mat- 
ters, seems to be able to see only one side of this 
question. And one side seems to be all he wishes 
to see. "Take my wife," he said to me the other 

[261 ] 



The Art of Living 

day; "as women go she is a very clever and sensi- 
ble woman. She was given the best advantages in 
thewayofschool-training open to young ladies of 
her day; she has accomplishments, domestic vir- 
tues, and fine religious instinds, and I adore her. 
Butwhat does she knowof politics? She could n't 
tell you the difference between a senator and an 
alderman, and her mind is pradically a blank on 
the tarifFor the silver question. I tell you, my dear 
fellow, that if woman is allowed to leave the do- 
mestic hearth and play ducks and drakes with the 
right ofsuffrage, every political caucus will become 
a retail drygoods store. If there is one thing which 
makes a philosopher despair of the future of the 
race, it is to stand in a crowded drygoods store 
and watch the jam of women perk and push and 
sidle and grab and covet and go well-nigh crazy 
over things to wear. The average woman knows 
about clothes, the next world, children, and her 
domestic duties. Let her stick to her sphere. A 
woman at a caucus ? Who would see that my din- 
ner was properly cooked, eh ?" 

One would suppose from these remarks that 
the male American citizen spends his days 
chiefly at caucuses ; whereas, as we all know when 
we refled:, he goes perhaps twice a year, if he be 

[ 262 ] 



The Case of Woman 

a pundilious patriot like Julius Caesar, and if not, 
probably does not go at all. If the consciousness 
that his wife could vote at a caucus would a6t as 
a spur to the masculine political conscience, the 
male American citizen could well afford to dine 
at a restaurant on eledllon-days, or to cook his 
own food now and then. 

Of course, even a man with views like Julius 
Caesar would be sorry to have his wife the sla- 
vish, dollish, or unenlightened individual which 
she was apt to be before so-called women's rights 
were heard of. As he himself has proclaimed, 
he adores his wife, and he is, moreover, secretly 
proud of her aesthetic presentabillty. Without 
being an advanced woman, Dolly Caesar has the 
interests of the day and hour at her fingers' ends, 
can talk Intelligently on any subjed:, whether she 
knows anything about it or not, and is decidedly 
in the van, though she is not a leader. Julius 
does not take into account, when he anathema- 
tizes the sex because of Its ambitions, the differ- 
ence between her and her great-grandmother. 
He believes his wife to be a very charming speci- 
men of what a woman ought to be, and that, 
barring a few differences of costume and hair ar- 
rangement, she is practically her great-grand- 

[ 263 ] 



The Art of Living 

mother over again. Fatuous Julius ! There is 
where he is desperately in error. Dolly Caesar's 
great-grandmother may have been a radiant 
beauty and a famous housekeeper, but her brain 
never harbored one-tenth of the ideas and opin- 
ions which make her descendant so attradive. 

Those who argue on this matter like Julius 
Caesar fail to take into account the gradual, silent 
results of time; and this is true of the results to 
come as well as those which have accrued. When 
the suffrage question is mooted one often hears 
sober men, more dispassionate men than Julius 
— Perkins, for instance, the thin, nervous law- 
yer and father of four girls, and a sober man 
indeed — ask judicially whether it is possible for 
female suffrage to be a success when not one 
woman in a thousand would know what was ex- 
pe6led of her, or how to vote. "I tell you," says 
Perkins, "they are utterly unfitted for it by train- 
ing and education. Four-fifths of them would n't 
vote if they were allowed to, and every one 
knows that ninety-nine women out of every 
hundred are profoundly ignorant of the matters 
in regard to which they would cast their ballots. 
Take my daughters ; fine girls, talented, intelli- 
gent women — one of them a student of history; 

[ 264] 



The Case of Woman 

but what do they know of parties, and platforms, 
and political issues in general P" 

Perkins is less violently prejudiced than Julius 
Caesar. He neither saws the air nor pounds on 
the table. Indeed, I have no doubt he believes 
that he entertains liberal, unbiassed views on the 
subje6l. I wonder, then, why it never occurs to 
him that everything which is new is adopted 
gradually, and that the world has to get accus- 
tomed to all novel situations. I happened to see 
Mr. Perkins the first time he rode a bicycle on 
the road, and his performance certainly justified 
the prediction that he would look like a guy to 
the end of his days, and yet he glides past me 
now with the ease and nonchalance of a possible 
"scorcher." Similarly, if women were given uni- 
versal suffrage, there would be a deal of fluttering 
in the dove-cotes for the first generation or so. 
Doubtless four-fifths of womankind would re- 
fuse or negled: to vote at all, and at least a quarter 
of those who went to the polls would cast their 
ballots as tools or blindly. But just so soon as it 
was understood that it was no less a woman's 
duty to vote than it was to attend to her back 
hair, she would be educated from that point of 
view, and her present crass ignorance of political 

[ 26s ] 



The Art of Living 

matters would be changed into at least a form of 
enlightenment. Man prides himself on his logic, 
but there is nothing logical in the argument that 
because a woman knows nothing about anything 
now, she can never be taught. If we have been 
content to have her remain ignorant for so many 
centuries, does it not savor both of despotism and 
lack of reasonableness to cast her ignorance in 
her teeth and to beat her about the head with 
it now that she is eager to rise ? Decidedly it is 
high time for the man who orates tempestuously 
or argues dogmatically in the name of conserva- 
tism against the cause of woman on such flimsy 
pleas as these, to cease his gesticulations and wise 
saws. The modern woman is a potential reality, 
who is bound to develop and improve, in an- 
other generation or two, as far beyond the pre- 
sent interesting type as Mrs. Julius Caesar is an 
advance on her great-grandmother. 

On the other hand, why do those who have 
woman's cause at heart lay such formal stress on 
the right of the ballot as a fador in her develop- 
ment ? There can be no doubt that, if the ma- 
jority of women wish to vote on questions in- 
volving property or political interests, they will 
be enabled to do so sooner or later. It is chiefly 

[ O.GG ] 



The Case of Woman 

now the conviction in the minds of legislatures 
that a large number of the intelligent women of 
their communities do not desire to exercise the 
right of suffrage which keeps the bars down. 
Doubtless these bodies will yield one after an- 
other to the clamor of even a few, and the ex- 
periment will be tried. It may not come this year 
or the next, but many busy people are so cer- 
tain that its coming is merely a question of time 
that they do not allow themselves to be drawn 
into the fury of the fray. When it comes, how- 
ever, it will come as a universal privilege, and 
not with a social or property qualification. I men- 
tion this simply for the enlightenment of those 
amiable members of the sex to be enfranchised 
who go about sighing and simpering in the in- 
terest of drawing the line. That question was 
settled a century ago. The adtion taken may have 
been an error on the part of those who framed 
the laws, but it has been settled forever. There 
would be no more chance of the passage by the 
legislature of one of the United States of a statute 
giving the right of suffrage to a limited class of 
women than there would be of one prescribing 
that only the good-looking members of that sex 
should be allowed to marry. 

[ 267 ] 



The Art of Living 

Many people, who believe that woman should 
be denied no privilege enjoyed by man which she 
really desires to exercise, find much difficulty in 
regarding the right of suffrage as the vital end 
which it assumes in the minds of its advocates. 
One would suppose, by the clamor on the subjed:, 
that the ballot would enable her to change her 
spots in a twinkling, and to become an absolutely 
different creation. Lively imaginations do not 
hesitate to compare the proposed ad: of emanci- 
pation with the release of the colored race from 
bondage. We are appealed to by glowing rhet- 
oric which celebrates the equity of the case and 
the moral significance of the impending vidory. 
But the orators and triumphants stop short at the 
passage of the law and fail to tell us what is to 
come after. We are assured, indeed, that it will 
be all right, and that woman's course after the 
Rubicon is crossed will be one grand march of 
progress to the music of the spheres ; but, bar- 
ring a paean of this sort, we are given no light as 
to what she intends to do and become. She has 
stretched out her hand for the rattle and is de- 
termined to have it, but she does not appear to 
entertain any very definite ideas as to what she 
is going to do with it after she has it. 

[ 268 ] 



The Case of Woman 

Unquestionably, the development of the mod- 
ern woman is one of the most interesting features 
of civilization to-day. But is it not true that the 
cause of woman is one concern, and the question 
of woman suffrage another? And are they not too 
often confounded, even deliberately confounded, 
by those who are willing to have them appear 
to be identical ? Supposing that to-morrow the 
trumpet should sound and the walls of Jericho 
fall, and every woman be free to cast her indi- 
vidual ballot without let or hindrance from one 
confine of the civilized world to another, what 
would it amount to after all by way of elucidating 
the question of her future evolution ? For it must 
be remembered that, apart from the question of 
her development in general, those who are clamor- 
ing for the ballot have been superbly vague so 
far as to the precise part which the gentle sex is 
to play in the political arena after she gets her 
rattle. They put their sisters off with the gen- 
eral assertion that things in the world, politically 
speaking, will be better, but neither their sisters 
nor their brothers are able to get a distind: notion 
of the platform on which woman means to stand 
after she becomes a voter. Is she going to enter 
into competition with men for the prizes and of- 

[ 269 ] 



'The Art of Living 

iices, to argue, manipulate, hustle, and do gen- 
erally the things which have to be done in the 
name of political zeal and activity? Is it within 
the vista of her ambition to become a member of, 
and seek to control, legislative bodies, to be a 
police commissioner or a member of Congress? 
Those in the van decline to answer, or at least 
they do not answer. It may be, to be sure, the 
wisdom of the serpent which keeps them non- 
committal, for they stand, as it were, between the 
devil and the deep sea in that, though they and 
their supporters would perhaps like to declare 
boldly in favor of competition, or at least par- 
ticipation, in the duties and honors, they stand 
in wholesome awe of the hoarse murmur from 
the ranks of their sisters, " We don't wish to be 
like men, and we have no intention of competing 
with them on their own lines." Accordingly, the 
leaders seek refuge in the safe but indefinite as- 
sertion that of course women will never become 
men, but they have thus far negleded to tell us 
what they are to become. 

It really seems as though it were time for wo- 
man, in general congress of the women's clubs 
assembled, to make a reasonably full and clear 
statement of her aims and principles — a declar- 

[ 270 ] 



The Case of Woman 

ation of faith which shall give her own sex and 
men the opportunity to know precisely what she 
is driving at. Her progress for the last hundred 
years has been gratifying to the world, with the 
exception of pig-headed or narrow-minded men, 
and civilization has been inestimably benefitted 
by the broadening of her intelligence and her in- 
terests. But she has now reached a point where 
there is a parting of the ways, and the world 
would very much like to know which she in- 
tends to take. The atmosphere of the women's 
clubs is mysterious but unsuggestive, and con- 
sequently many of us feel inclined to murmur 
with the poet, "it is clever, but we don't know 
what it means." Unrepressed nervous mental 
ad:ivity easily becomes social affedlation or tom- 
foolery, in the absence of a controlling aim or 
purpose. To exhaust one's vitality in papers or 
literary teas, merely to express or simulate indi- 
vidual culture or freedom, may not land one in 
an insane asylum, but it is about as valuable to 
society, as an educating force, as the revolutions 
of the handle of a freezer, when the crank is off, 
are valuable to the production of ice-cream. For 
the benefit of such a congress, if haply it should 
be called together later, it will not be out of 

[ 271 ] 



The Art of Living 

place to offer a few suggestions as to her future 
evolution. In this connexion it seems to me im- 
perative to go back to the original poetic con- 
ception of woman as the wife and mother, the 
domestic helpmate and loving, self-abnegating 
companion of man. Unedifying as this formula 
of description may seem to the adive-minded 
modern woman, it is obvious that under exist- 
ing physiological conditions she must remain 
the wife and mother, even though she declines 
to continue domestic, loving, and self-abnegat- 
ing. And side by side with physiological condi- 
tions stands the intangible, ineffable force of 
sexual love, the poetic, entrancing ecstasy which 
no scientist has yet been able to reduce to a 
myth or to explode. Schopenhauer, to be sure, 
would have us believe that it is merely a delusion 
by which nature seeks to reproduce herself, but 
even on this material basis the women's clubs 
find themselves face to face with an enemy more 
determined than any Amazon. A maid deluded 
becomes the sorriest of club members. 

What vision of life is nobler and more exqui- 
site than that of complete and ideal marital hap- 
piness ? To find it complete and ideal the mod- 
ern woman, with all her charms and abilities, 

[ 272 ] 



The Case of Woman 

must figure in it, I grant; the mere domestic 
drudge; the tame, amiable house-cat; the doting 
doll, are no longer pleasing parties of the second 
part. To admit so much as this may seem to of- 
fer room for the argument that the modern wo- 
man of a hundred years hence will make her of 
the poet^s dream of to-day appear no less pitia- 
ble; but there we men are ready to take issue. 
We admit our past tyranny, we cry "Peccavi," 
yet we claim at the same time that, having taken 
her to our bosoms as our veritable, loving com- 
panion and helpmate, there is no room left, or 
very little room left, for more progress in that 
particular diredion. Her next steps, if taken, will 
be on new lines, not by way of making herself 
an equal. And therefore it is that we suggest the 
vision of perfed: modern marital happiness as 
the leading consideration to be taken into ac- 
count in dealing with this question. Even in the 
past, when woman was made a drudge and en- 
couraged to remain a fool, the poetry and joy and 
stimulus of life for her, as well as for her despot 
mate, lay in the mystery of love, its joys and re- 
sponsibilities. Even then, if her life were robbed 
of the opportunity to love and be loved, its savor 
was gone, however free she might be from mas- 

[ 273 ] 



The Art of Living 

culine tyranny and coercion. Similarly, after 
making due allowance for the hyperbole as to 
the influence which woman has on man when he 
has made up his mind to ad: to the contrary, 
there is no power which works for righteous- 
ness upon him comparable to the influence of 
woman. There is always the possibility that the 
woman a man loves may not be consciously 
working for righteousness, but the fad that he 
believes so is the essential truth, even though 
he be the vidim of self-delusion. This element 
of the case is pertinent to the question whether 
woman would really try to reform the world, if 
she had the chance, rather than to this particu- 
lar consideration. The point of the argument is 
that the dependence of each sex on the other, 
and the loving sympathy between them, which 
is born of dissimilarity, is the salt of human life. 
The eternal feminine is what we prize in woman, 
and wherever she defleds from this there does 
her power wane and her usefulness become im- 
paired. And conversely, the more and the higher 
she advances along the lines of her own nature, 
the better for the world. Nor does the claim that 
she has been hampered hitherto, and conse- 
quently been unable to show what her attributes 

[ 274 ] 



The Case of Woman 

really are, seem relevant; for it is only when she 
develops in directions which threaten to clash 
with the eternal feminine that she encounters 
opposition or serious criticism. And here even 
the excitability and unreasonableness of such 
men as our friend Julius Cassar find a certain jus- 
tification. Their fumes and fury, however unin- 
telligent, proceed from an instindlive repugnance 
to the departure or deviation from nature which 
they find, or fear to find, in the modern woman. 
Once let them realize that there was no danger 
of anything of the kind, and they would become 
gentle as doves, if not all smiles and approval. 
There is no more beautiful and refining influ- 
ence in the world than that of an attractive and 
noble woman. Unselfishness, tenderness, aspir- 
ing sentiment, long-suffering devotion, grace, 
ta6t, and quickly divining intelligence are her 
prerogatives, and she stands an ever-watchful 
guardian angel at the shoulder of man. The lead- 
ing poetic and elevating associations of life are 
linked with her name. The lover's passion, the 
husband's worship, the son's reverential aff^eClion 
are inspired by her. The strong man stays his 
hand and sides with mercy or honor when his 
mother speaks within him. In homelier language, 

[ 275 ] 



The Art of Living 

she is the keeper of the hearth and home, the 
protector and trainer of her children, the adviser, 
consoler, and companion of her husband, father, 
son, brother, or other masculine associates. 

Now, the modern woman, up to this point, 
has been disposed, on the whole, to regard this 
as the part which she is to play in the drama of 
life. At least she has not materially deviated from 
it. Her progress has been simply in the way of 
enabling her to play that part more intelligently 
and worthily, and not toward usurpation, except- 
ing that she claims the right to earn her daily 
bread. Higher education in its various branches 
has been the most signal fruit of her struggle for 
enlightenment and liberty, and this is certainly 
in entire keeping with the eternal feminine, and 
to-day seems indispensable to her suitable de- 
velopment. By means of education similar to 
that lavished upon man she has been enabled, it 
is true, to obtain employment of various kinds 
hitherto withheld from her, but the positions of 
professor, teacher, nurse, artist, and clerk, are 
amplifications of her natural aptitudes rather than 
encroachments. She has, however, finally reached 
the stage where she will soon have to decide whe- 
ther the hearth and the home or down-town is to 

[276 ] 



The Case of Woman 

be the principal theatre of her adivity and influ- 
ence. Is she or is she not to participate with man 
in the tangible, obvious management of the af- 
fairs of the world ? 



[ 277 ] 



The Case of Woman. 
II. 

^^^^HE mystic oracles of the women's 
rp ^ clubs do not give a straightforward 



answer to this question. Yet there are 
mutterings, mouthings, and signs 
from them which tend to arouse masculine sus- 
picions. To use a colloquialism, woman fancies 
herself very much at present, and she spends con- 
siderable time in studying the set of her mind in 
the looking-glass. And her serenity is justified. 
In spite of ridicule, baiting, and delay for several 
generations, she has demonstrated her ability and 
fitness to do a number of things which we had 
adjudged her incapable of doing. She can almost 
take care of herself in the street after dark. She 
has become a most valuable member of commit- 
tees to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the 
sick, and the insane. She has become the presi- 
dent and professors of colleges founded in her 
behalf. The noble and numerous army of teach- 
ers, typewriters, salesladies, nurses, and women 
do6tors (including Christian Scientists), stands 
as ample proof of her intention and capacity to 
strike out for herself No wonder, perhaps, that 

[ 278 ] 



The Case of Woman 

she is a little delirious and mounted in the head, 
and that she is tempted to exclaim, " Go to, I will 
do more than this. Why should I not pradise 
law, and sell stocks, wheat, corn, and exchange, 
control the money markets of the world, admin- 
ister trusts, manage corporations, sit in Congress, 
and be President of the United States?'* 

The only things now done by man which the 
modern woman has not yet begun to cast sheep's 
eyes at are labor requiring much physical strength 
and endurance, and military service. She is pre- 
pared to admit that she can never expedl to be so 
muscular and powerful in body as man. But this 
has become rather a solace than a source of per- 
plexity to her. Indeed, the women's clubs are 
beginning to whisper under their breath, " Man 
is fitted to build and hew and cut and lift, and to 
do everything which demands brute force. We 
are not. We should like to think, plan, and exe- 
cute. Let him do the heavy work. If he wishes 
to fight he may. Wars are wicked, and we shall 
vote against them and refuse to take part in 
them." 

If woman is going in for this sort of thing, of 
course she needs the ballot. If she intends to 
manage corporations and do business generally, 

[ 279 ] 



The Art of Living 

she ought to have a voice in the framing of the 
laws which manifest the policy of the state. But 
to earn one's living as a college professor, nurse, 
typewriter, saleslady, or clerk, or to sit on boards 
of charity, education, or hygiene, is a far remove 
from becoming bank presidents, merchants, 
judges, bankers, or members of Congress. The 
one affords the means by which single women can 
earn a decent and independent livelihood, or de- 
vote their energies to work useful to society; the 
other would necessitate an absolute revolution 
in the habits, tastes, interests, proclivities, and 
nature of woman. The noble army of teachers, 
typewriters, nurses, and salesladies are in the 
heels of their boots hoping to be married some 
day or other. They have merely thrown an 
anchor to windward and taken up a calling which 
will enable them to live reasonably happy if the 
right man does not appear, or passes by on the 
other side. Those who sit on boards, and who 
are more apt to be middle-aged, are but inter- 
preting and fulfilling the true mission of the mod- 
ern woman, which is to supplement and modify 
the point of view of man, and to extend the kind 
of influence which she exercises at home to the 
condud: of public interests of a certain class. 

[280] 



The Case of Woman 

Now, some one must keep house. Some one 
must cook, wash, dust, sweep, darn, look after 
the children, and in general grease the wheels of 
domestic adtivity. If women are to become mer- 
chants, and manage corporations, who will bring 
up our families and manage the home ? The ma- 
jority of the noble army referred to are not able 
to escape from making their own beds and cook- 
ing their own breakfasts. If they occupied other 
than comparatively subordinate positions they 
would have to call Chinatown to the rescue; for 
the men would decline with thanks, relying on 
their brute force to proted: them, and the other 
women would toss their heads and say "Make 
your own beds, you nasty things. We prefer to 
go to town too." In fadt the emancipation of 
women, so far as it relates to usurpation of the 
work of man, does not mean much in adual 
pradice yet, in spite of the brave show and bus- 
tle of the noble army. The salesladies get their 
meals somehow, and the domestic hearth is still 
presided over by the mistress of the house and 
her daughters. But this cannot continue to be 
the case if women are going to do everything 
which men do except lift weights and fight. For 
we all know that our mothers, wives, and sisters, 

[ 281 ] 



The Art of Living 

according to their own affidavits, have all they 
can do already to fulfil the requirements of mod- 
ern life as mothers, wives, and sisters in the con- 
ventional yet modern sense. Many of them tell 
us that they would not have time to vote, to say 
nothing of qualifying themselves to vote. Indis- 
putably they cannot become men and yet remain 
women in the matter of their daily occupations, 
unless they discover some new panacea against 
nervous prostration. The professions are open; 
the laws will allow them to establish banks and 
control corporate interests ; but what is to be- 
come of the eternal feminine in the pow-wow, 
bustle, and materializing rush and competition of 
ad:ive business life ? Whatever a few individuals 
may do, there seems to be no immediate or prob- 
ably eventual prosped: of a throwing off by wo- 
man of domestic ties and duties. Her physical 
and moral nature alike are formidable barriers 
in the way. 

Why, then, if women are not going to usurp 
or share to any great extent the occupations of 
men, and become familiar with the practical work- 
ings of professional, business, and public affairs, 
are they ever likely to be able to judge so intel- 
ligently as men as to the needs of the state ? To 

[ 282 ] 



The Case of Woman 

hear many people discuss the subjed:, one would 
suppose that all the laws passed by legislative 
bodies were limited to questions of ethics and 
morality. If all political a6tion were reduced to 
debates and ballots on the use of liquor, the social 
evil, and other moral or humanitarian topics, the 
claim that women ought to be allowed and en- 
couraged to vote would be much stronger — that 
is, assuming that she herself preferred to use her 
influence diredly instead of indiredtly. But the 
advocates of female suffrage seem to forget that 
three-fifths of the laws passed relate to matters 
remotely if at all bearing upon ethics, and involve 
considerations of public policy from the point of 
view of what is best for the interests of the state 
and the various classes of individuals which com- 
pose it. We do not always remember in this age 
of afternoon teas and literary papers that the state 
is after all an artificial body, a form of compad: 
under which human beings agree to live together 
for mutual benefit and protection. Before culture, 
aestheticism, or even ethics can be maintained 
there must be a readiness and ability to fight, if 
the necessity arises, and a capacity to do heavy 
work. Moreover, there must be ploughed fields 
and ship-yards and grain-elevators and engines 

[ 283 ] 



The Art of Living 

and manufadlorieSj and all the divers forms and 
phases of industrial and commercial endeavor and 
enterprise by which men earn their daily bread. 
If woman is going to participate in the material 
activities of the community she will be fit to deal 
with the questions which relate thereto, but oth- 
erwise she must necessarily remain unable to form 
a satisfactory judgment as to the merits of more 
than one-half the measures upon which she would 
be obliged to vote. Nor is it an argument in point 
that a large body of men is in the same predica- 
ment. Two evils do not make a benefit. There 
is a sufficient number of men conversant with 
every separate practical question which arises to 
insure an intelligent examination of it. The es- 
sential consideration is, what would the state gain, 
if woman suffrage were adopted, except an en- 
larged constituency of voters ? What would wo- 
man, by means of the ballot, add to the better 
or smoother development of the social system 
under which we live ? 

Unless the eternal feminine is to be sacrificed 
or to suffer, it seems to me that her sole influence 
would be an ethical or moral one. There are cer- 
tainly strong grounds for the assumption that 
she would point the way to, or at least champion, 

[ 284 ] 



The Case of Woman 

the cause of reforms which man has perpetually 
dilly-dallied with and failed to do battle for. To 
be sure, many of her most virtuous endeavors 
would be likely to be focussed on matters where 
indulgences and weaknesses chiefly masculine 
were concerned — such as the liquor problem; 
but an alliance between her vote and that of the 
minority of men would probably be a blessing to 
the world, even though she showed herself some- 
what a tyrant or a fanatic. Her advocacy of mea- 
sures calculated to relieve society of abuses and 
curses, which have continued to afflid: it because 
men have been only moderately in earnest for a 
change, could scarcely fail to produce valuable 
results. Perhaps this is enough in itself to out- 
weigh the ignorance which she would bring to 
bear on matters which did not involve ethical or 
humanitarian principles; and it is indisputably 
the most legitimate argument in favor of woman 
suffrage. The notion that women ought to vote 
simply because men do is childish and born of 
vanity. On the other hand, if the state is to be a 
gainer by her participation in the perplexities of 
voting, the case takes on a very different asped:. 
I have been assuming that the influence of 
woman would be in behalf of ethics, but my wife 

[ 285 ] 



The Art of Living 

Barbara assures me that I am thereby begging 
the question. She informs me that I have too ex- 
alted an idea of woman and her aims. She has 
confided to me that, though there is a number of 
noble and forceful women in every community, 
the general average, though prolific of moral and 
religious advice to men by way of fulfilling a sort 
of traditional feminine duty, is at heart rather 
flighty and less deeply interested in social pro- 
gress than my sex. This testimony, taken in con- 
nexion with the reference of Julius Caesar to the 
disillusioning effed: of a crowd of women in a 
drygoods store, introduces a new element into 
the discussion. Frankly, my estimate of women 
has always been high, and possibly unduly ex- 
alted. It may be I have been deceived by the 
moral and religious advice offered into believing 
that women are more serious than they really 
are. Reflexion certainly does cause one to recoi- 
led that comparatively few women like to dwell 
on or to discuss for more than a few minutes any 
serious subje6t which requires earnest thought. 
They prefer to skim from one thing to another 
like swallows and to avoid dry depths. Those in 
the van will doubtless answer that this is due to 
the unfortunate training which woman has been 

[a86] 



T^he Case of Woman 

subjected to for so many generations. True, in a 
measure ; but ought she not, before she is allowed 
to vote, on the plea of bringing benefit to the state 
as an ethical adviser, to demonstrate by more 
than words her ethical superiority? 

We all know that women drink less intoxi- 
cating liquor than men, and are less addicted to 
fleshly excesses. Yet the whole mental temper 
and make-up of each sex ought to be taken into 
account in comparing them together; and with 
all the predisposition of a gallant and suscepti- 
ble man to say the complimentary thing, I find 
myself asking the question whether the average 
woman does not prefer to jog along on a worsted- 
work-domestic- trusting-religious-advice-giving 
basis, rather than to grapple in a serious way with 
the formidable problems of living. At any rate 
I, for one, before the right of suffrage is be- 
stowed upon her, would like to be convinced 
that she as a sex is really earnest-minded. If one 
stops to think, it is not easy to show that, ex- 
cepting where liquor, other women, and rigid 
attendance at church are concerned, she has been 
wont to show any very decided bent for, or in- 
terest in, the great reforms of civilization — that 
is, nothing to distinguish her from a well- 

[ 287 ] 



The Art of Living 

equipped and thoughtful man. It is significant, 
too, that where women in this country have been 
given the power to vote in local affairs, they have 
in several instances shown themselves to be more 
solicitous for the triumph of a religious creed or 
faction than to promote the public welfare. 

It is extremely probable, if not certain, that 
the laws of all civilized states will eventually be 
amended so as to give women the same voice 
in the affairs of government as men. But taking 
all the fadors of the case into consideration, 
there seems to be no pressing haste for adlion. 
Even admitting for the sake of argument that 
woman's apparent lack of seriousness is due to 
her past training, and that she is really the ad- 
mirably earnest spirit which one is lured into 
believing her until he reflects, there can assuredly 
be no question that the temper and proclivities 
of the very large mass of women are not calcu- 
lated at present to convid: man of a lack of pur- 
pose by virtue of shining superiority in perse- 
vering mental and moral aggressiveness. Not 
merely the drygoods counter and the milliner's 
store with their engaging seductions, but the 
ball-room, the fancy-work pattern, the sensa- 
tional novel, nervous prostration, the school- 

[ 288 ] 



T^he Case of Woman 

girl's giggle, the teapot without food, and a host 
of other tell-tale symptoms, suggest that there 
is a good deal of the old Eve left in the woman 
of to-day. And bless her sweet heart, Adam is 
in no haste to have it otherwise. Indeed, the 
eternal feminine seems to have staying qualities 
which bid fair to outlast the ages. 



[ 289 ] 



The ConduSi of Life. 
I. 



OW that more than a century 
has elapsed since our indepen- 
dence as a nation was accom- 
plished, and we are sixty million 
strong, what do we stand for in 



N 



the world ? What is meant by the word Ameri- 
can, and what are our salient qualities as a peo- 
ple ? What is the contribution which we have 
made or are making to the progress of society 
and the advancement of civilization ? 

There certainly used to be, and probably there 
is, no such egregiously patriotic individual in the 
world as an indiscriminately patriotic American, 
and there is no more familiar bit of rhetoric ex- 
tant than that this is the greatest nation on earth. 
The type of citizen who gave obtrusive vent to 
this sentiment, both at home and abroad, is less 
common than formerly; nevertheless his clarion 
tones are still invariably to be heard in legisla- 
tive assemblies when any opportunity is afforded 
to draw a comparison between ourselves and 
other nations. His extravagant and highfalutin 
boastings have undoubtedly been the occasion of 

[ 290 ] 



The ConduEi of Life 

a certain amount of seemingly lukewarm patriot- 
ism on the part of the educated and more intel- 
ligent portion of the American public, an atti- 
tude which has given foreigners the opportunity 
to declare that the best Americans are ashamed 
of their own institutions. But that apparent dis- 
position to apologize already belongs to a past 
time. No American, unless a fool, denies to-day 
the force of the national charader, whatever he 
or she may think of the behavior of individuals; 
and on the other hand, is it not true that every 
State in the Union has a rising population of 
young and middle-aged people who have dis- 
covered. Congress and the public schools to the 
contrary notwithstanding, that we do not know 
everything, and that the pathway of national 
progress is more full of perplexities than our 
forests were of trees when Daniel Boone built 
his log cabin in the wilds of Kentucky ? In short, 
the period of unintelligent jubilation on one side, 
and carping cynicism on the other, have given 
place to a soberer self-satisfadtion. We cannot — 
why should we? — forget that our territory is 
enormous, and that we soon shall be, if we are 
not already, the richest nation on earth; that the 
United States is the professed asylum and Mecca 

[ 291 ] 



The Art of Living 

of hope for the despondent and oppressed of 
other countries; and that we are the cynosure 
of the universe, as being the most important ex- 
emplification of popular government which the 
world has ever seen. At the same time, the claims 
put forth by our progenitors, that American so- 
ciety is vastly superior to any other, and that 
the effete world of Europe is put to the blush 
by the civic virtues of the land of the free and 
the home of the brave, are no longer urged ex- 
cept for the purposes of rodomontade. The ave- 
rage American of fifty years ago — especially the 
frontiersman and pioneer, who swung his axe to 
clear a homestead, and squirted tobacco-juice 
while he tilled the prairie — really believed that 
our customs, opinions, and manner of living, 
whether viewed from the moral, artistic, or in- 
tellectual standpoint, were a vast improvement 
on those of any other nation. 

But though most of us to-day recognize the 
absurdity of such a view, we are most of us at 
the same time conscious of the belief that there 
is a difference between us and the European 
which is not imaginary, and which is the secret 
of our national force and originality. Interna- 
tional intercourse has served to open our eyes 

[ 292 ] 



The ConduEi of Life 

until they have become as wide as saucers, with 
the consequence that, in hundreds of branches 
of industry and art, we are studying Old World 
methods; moreover, the pioneer strain of blood 
has been diluted by hordes of immigrants of the 
scum of the earth. In spite of both these circum- 
stances, our faith in our originality and in the 
value of it remains unshaken, and we are no less 
sure at heart that our salient traits are noble ones, 
than the American of fifty years ago was sure that 
we had the monopoly of all the virtues and all 
the arts. He really meant only what we mean, 
but he had an unfortunate way of expressing 
himself. We have learned better taste, and we 
do not hesitate nowadays to devote our native 
humor to hitting hard the head of bunkum, 
which used to be as sacred as a Hindoo god, and 
as rife as apple-blossoms in this our beloved 
country. 

What is the recipe for Americanism — that con- 
dition of the system and blood, as it were, which 
even the immigrant without an ideal to his own 
soul, seems often to acquire to some extent as 
soon as he breathes the air of Castle Garden ? 
It is difficult to define it in set speech, for it 
seems almost an illusive and intangible quality 

[ 293 ] 



The Art of Living 

of being when fingered and held up to the light. 
It seems to me to be, first of all, a conscious- 
ness of unfettered individuality coupled with a 
determination to make the most of self. One 
great force of the American charader is its nat- 
uralness, which proceeds from a total lack of 
traditional or inherited disposition to crook the 
knee to any one. It never occurs to a good 
American to be obsequious. In vulgar or igno- 
rant personalities this point of view has some- 
times manifested itself, and continues to mani- 
fest itself, in swagger or insolence, but in the 
finer form of nature appears as simplicity of an 
unassertive yet dignified type. Gracious polite- 
ness, without condescension on the one hand, 
or fawning on the other, is noticeably a trait of 
the best element of American society, both 
among men and women. Indeed, so valuable to 
character and ennobling is this native freedom 
from servility, that it has in many cases in the 
past made odd and unconventional manner and 
behavior seem attractive rather than a blemish. 
Unconventionality is getting to be a thing of 
the past in this country, and the representative 
American is at a disadvantage now, both at 
home and abroad, if he lacks the ways of the 

C 294 ] 



The ConduSi of Life 

best social world; he can no longer afford to ig- 
nore cosmopolitan usages, and to rely solely on 
a forceful or imposing personality ; the world of 
London and Paris, of New York and Washing- 
ton and Chicago, has ceased to thrill, and is 
scarcely amused, if he shows himself merely in 
the guise of a splendid intelledual buifalo. But 
the best Americanism of to-day reveals itself no 
less distindtly and unequivocally in simplicity 
bred of a lack of self-consciousness and a lack 
of servility of mind. It seems to carry with it a 
birthright of self-resped:, which, if fitly worn, 
ennobles the humblest citizen. 

This national quality of self-respe6l is apt to 
be associated with the desire for self-improve- 
ment or success. Indeed, it must engender it, for 
it provides hope, and hope is the touchstone of 
energy. The great energy of Americans is as- 
cribed by some to the climate, and it is proba- 
bly true that the nervous temperaments of our 
people are stimulated by the atmospheric con- 
ditions which surround us; but is it not much 
more true that, just as it never occurs to the 
good American to be servile, so he feels that his 
outlook upon the possibilities of life is not lim- 
ited or qualified, and that the world is really his 

[ 295 ] 



The Art of Living 

oyster? To be sure, this faith has been fostered 
by the almost Aladdin-Hke opportunities which 
this great and rich new country of ours has af- 
forded. But whatever the reason for our native 
energy and self-reliance, it indisputably exists, 
and is signally typical of the American character. 
We are distinctly an ambitious, earnest people, 
eager to make the most of ourselves individu- 
ally, and we have attraded the attention of the 
world by force of our independent activity of 
thought and adlion. The extraordinary person- 
ality of Abraham Lincoln is undoubtedly the 
best apotheosis yet presented of unadulterated 
Americanism. In him the native stock was free 
from the foreign influences and suggestions 
which affedled, more or less, the people of the 
East. His origin was of the humblest sort, and 
yet he presented most saliently in his character 
the naturalness, nobility, and aspiring energy of 
the nation. He made the most of himself by 
virtue of unusual abilities, yet the key-note of 
their influence and force was a noble simplicity 
and farsighted independence. In him the quin- 
tessence of the Americanism of thirty years ago 
was summed up and expressed. In many ways 
he was a riddle at first to the people of the cities 

[ 296 ] 



The ConduSi of Life 

of the East in that, though their soul was his 
soul, his ways had almost ceased to be their 
ways; but he stands before the world to-day as 
the foremost interpreter of American ideas and 
American temper of thought as they then existed. 
In the thirty years since the death of Abraham 
Lincoln the country has been inundated with for- 
eign blood. Irish, Germans, English, Poles, and 
Scandinavians, mainly of the pauper or peasant 
class, have landed in large numbers, settled in 
one State or another, and become a part of the 
population. The West, at the time of the Civil 
War, was chiefly occupied by settlers of New 
England or Eastern stock — pioneers from the 
older cities and towns who had sought fortune 
and a freer life in the new territory of prairies 
and unappropriated domain. The population of 
the whole country to-day bears many different 
strains of blood in its veins. The original settlers 
have chiefly prospered. The sons of those who 
split rails or followed kindred occupations in the 
fifties, and listened to the debates between Lin- 
coln and Douglas, are the proprietors of Chicago, 
Denver, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Topeka. 
Johann Heintz now follows the plough and in 
turn squirts tobacco-juice while he tills the prai- 

[ 297 ] 



The Art of Living 

rie; and Louis Levinsky, Paul Petrinoff, and 
Michael O'Neil forge the plough-shares, dig in 
the mine, or work in the fadlory side by side with 
John Smith and any descendant of Paul Revere 
who has failed to prosper in life's battle. But this 
is not all. Not merely are the plain people in the 
dilemma of being unable to pronounce the names 
of their neighbors, but the same is getting to be 
trueof the well-to-do merchants and tradespeople 
of many of our cities. The argus-eyed commer- 
cial foreigner has marked us for his own, and his 
kith and kin are to-day coming into possession 
of our drygoods establishments, our restaurants, 
our cigar stores, our hotels, our old furniture 
haunts, our theatres, our jewelry shops, and what 
not. One has merely to open a directory in order 
to find the names in any leading branch of trade 
plentifully larded with Adolph Stein, Simon Levi, 
Gustave Cohen, or something ending in berger. 
They sell our wool ; they float our loans ; they 
manufad:ure our sugar, our whiskey, and our 
beer; they influence Congress. They are here 
for what they can make, and they do not waste 
their time in sentiment. They did not come in 
time to reap the original harvest, but they have 
blown across the ocean to help the free-born 

[ 298 ] 



The ConduEi of Life 

American spend his money in the process of try- 
ing to out-civilize Paris and London. As a con- 
sequence, the leading wholesale and retail orna- 
mental industries of New York and of some of 
our Western cities are in the grip of individuals 
whose surnames have a foreign twang. Of course, 
they have a right to be here ; it is a free country, 
and no one can say them nay. But we must take 
them and their wives and daughters, their cus- 
toms and their opinions, into consideration in 
making an estimate of who are the Americans of 
the present. They have not come here for their 
health, as the phrase is, but they have come to 
stay. We at present, in our social hunger and 
thirst, supply the grandest and dearest market 
of the world for the disposal of everything beau- 
tiful and costly and artistic which the Old World 
possesses, and all the shopkeepers of Europe, 
with the knowledge of generations on the tips 
of their tongues and in the corners of their brains, 
have come over to coin dowries for their daugh- 
ters in the land of the free and the home of the 
brave. Many of them have already made large 
fortunes in the process, and are beginning to con 
the pages of the late Ward McAllister's book on 
etiquette with a view to social aggressiveness. 

[ 299 ] 



The Art of Living 

Despite this infusion of foreign blood, the na- 
tive stock and the Anglo-Saxon nomenclature are 
still, of course, predominant in numbers. There 
are some portions of the country where the late 
immigrant is scarcely to be found. True also is 
it that these late-comers, like the immigrants of 
fifty years ago, have generally been prompt in 
appropriating the independent and energetic 
spirit typical of our people. But there is a sig- 
nificant distindion to be borne in mind in this 
connexion: The independent energy of the 
Americans of fifty years ago, whether in the East 
or among the pioneers of the Western frontier, 
was not, however crude its manifestations, mere 
bombastic assertiveness, but the expression of a 
faith and the expression of strong charader. 
They were often ignorant, conceited, narrow, 
hard, and signally inartistic; but they stood for 
principle and right as they saw and believed it; 
they cherished ideals; they were firm as adamant 
in their convictions; and God talked with them 
whether in the store or workshop, or at the 
plough. This was essentially true of the rank 
and file of the people, no less true and perhaps 
more true of the humblest citizens than of the 
well-to-do and prominent. 

[ 300 ] 



The ConduSi of Life 

There can be little doubt that the foreign ele- 
ment which is now a part of the American peo- 
ple represents neither a faith nor the expression 
of ideals or convictions. The one, and the largest 
portion of it, is the overflow and riff-raff of the 
so-called proletariat of Europe ; the other is 
the evidence of a hyena-like excursion for the 
purposes of plunder. In order to be a good 
American it is not enough to become indepen- 
dent and energetic. The desire to make the most 
of one's self is a relative term; it must proceed 
from principle and be nourished by worthy, ethi- 
cal aims; otherwise it satisfies itself with paltry 
conditions, or with easy-going florid materialism. 
The thieving and venality in municipal political 
affairs of the Irish-American, thedull squalor and 
brutish contentment of the Russian-Pole, and the 
commercial obliquity of vision and earthy am- 
bitions of the German Jew, are fadlors in our 
national life which are totally foreign to the 
Americanism for which Abraham Lincoln stood. 
We have opened our gates to a horde of eco- 
nomic ruffians and malcontents, ethical bankrupts 
and social thugs, and we must needs be on our 
guard lest their aims and point of view be so 
engrafted on the public conscience as to sap the 

[ 301 ] 



The Art of Living 

vital principles which are the foundation of our 
strength as a people. The danger from this source 
is all the greater from the fad that the point of 
view of the American people has been changed 
so radically during the last thirty years as a 
secondary result of our material prosperity. We 
have ceased to be the austere nation we once 
were, and we have sensibly let down the bars in 
the manner of our living; we have recognized 
the value of, and we enjoy, many things which 
our fathers put from them as inimical to repub- 
lican virtue and demoralizing to society. Contadt 
with older civilizations has made us wiser and 
more appreciative, and with this growth of per- 
spective and the acquirement of an eye for color 
has come a liberaHty of sentiment which threatens 
to debauch us unless we are careful. There are 
many, especially among the wealthy and fashion- 
able, who in their ecstasy over our emancipation 
are disposed to throw overboard everything which 
suggests the old regime, and to introduce any cus- 
tom which will tend to make life more easy-going 
and spedacular. And in this they are supported 
by the immigrant foreigner, who would be only 
too glad to see the land of his adoption made to 
conform in all its usages to the land of his birth. 

[ 302 ] 



The ConduEi of Life 

The condud: of life here has necessarily and 
beneficially been aifed:ed by the almost general 
recognition that we have not a monopoly of all 
the virtues, and by the adoption of many cus- 
toms and points of view recommended by cos- 
mopolitan experience. The American people still 
believe, however, that our civilization is not 
merely a repetition of the older ones, and a du- 
plication on new soil of the old social treadmill. 
That it must be so in a measure every one will 
admit, but we still insist, and most of us believe, 
that we are to point the way to a new dispensa- 
tion. We believe, but at the same time when we 
stop to think we find some difficulty in specify- 
ing exactly what we are doing to justify the 
faith. It is easy enough to get tangled up in 
the stars and stripes and cry "hurrah !" and to 
thrust the American eagle down the throats of a 
weary universe, but it is quite another to com- 
mand the admiration of the world by behavior 
commensurate with our ambition and self-con- 
fidence. Our forefathers could point to their own 
nakedness as a proof of their greatness, but there 
seems to be some danger that we, now that we 
have clothed ourselves — and clothed ourselves 
as expensively as possible and not always in the 

[ 303 ] 



The Art of Living 

best taste — will forget the ideas and ideals for 
which those fathers stood, and let ourselves be 
seduced by the specious dodrine that human 
nature is always human nature, and that all civi- 
lizations are alike. To be sure, an American now 
is apt to look and a6t like any other rational mor- 
tal, and there is no denying that the Atlantic 
cable and ocean greyhound have brought the 
nations of the world much closer together than 
they ever were before; but this merely proves 
that we can become just like the others, only 
worse, in case we choose to. But we intend to 
improve upon them. 

To those who believe that we are going to 
improve upon them it must be rather an edify- 
ing spectacle to observe the doings and sayings 
of that body of people in the city of New York 
who figure in the newspapers of the day as "the 
four hundred," "the smart set," or "the fashion- 
able world." After taking into full account the 
claims of the sensitive city of Chicago, it may 
be truthfully stated that the city of New York 
is the Paris of America. There are other muni- 
cipalities which are doing their best in their sev- 
eral ways to rival her, but it is toward New York 
that all the eyes in the country are turned, and 

[ 304 ] 



"The ConduEi of Life 

from which they take suggestion as a cat laps 
milk. The rest of us are in a measure provincial. 
Many of us profess not to approve of New 
York, but, though we cross ourselves piously, 
we take or read a New York daily paper. New 
York gives the cue alike to the Secretary of the 
Treasury and (by way of London) to the social 
swell. The ablest men in the country seek New 
York as a market for their brains, and the wealth- 
iest people of the country move to New York 
to spend the patrimony which their rail-splitting 
fathers or grandfathers accumulated. Therefore 
it is perfe6lly just to refer to the social life of 
New York as representative of that element of 
the American people which has been most blessed 
with brains or fortune, and as representative of 
our most highly evolved civilization. It ought to 
be our best. The men and women who contri- 
bute to its movement and influence ought to be 
the pick of the country. But what do we find } 
We find as the ostensible leaders of New York 
society a set of shallow worldlings whose whole 
existence is given up to emulating one another 
in elaborate and splendid inane social fripperies. 
They dine and wine and dance and entertain from 
January to December. Their houses, whether in 

[ ^^S ] 



The Art of Living 

town or at the fashionable watering-places to 
which they move in summer, are as sumptuous, 
if not more so, than those of the French nobil- 
ity in its palmiest days, and their energies are 
devoted to the discovery of new expensive lux- 
uries and fresh titillating creature comforts. That 
such a body of people should exist in this coun- 
try after little more than a century of democratic 
institutions is extraordinary, but much more ex- 
traordinary is the absorbing interest which a large 
portion of the American public takes in the do- 
ings and sayings of this fashionable rump. There 
is the disturbing feature of the case. Whatever 
these worldlings do is flashed over the entire 
country, and is copied into a thousand newspa- 
pers as being of vital concern to the health and 
home of the nation. The editors print it because 
it is demanded; because they have found that 
the free-born American citizen is keenly solici- 
tous to know "what is going on in society," and 
that he or she follows with almost feverish in- 
terest and with open-mouthed absorption the 
spangled and jewelled annual social circus parade 
which goes on in the Paris of America. The pub- 
lic is indifferently conscious that underneath this 
frothy upper-crust in New York there is a large 

[306] 



The ConduEl of Life 

number of the ablest men and women of the 
country by whose adivities the great educational, 
philanthropic, and artistic enterprises of the day 
have been fostered, promoted, and made suc- 
cessful; but this consciousness pales into second- 
ary importance in the democratic mind as com- 
pared with realistic details concerning this ball 
and that dinner-party where thousands of dol- 
lars are poured out in vulgar extravagance, or 
concerning the cost of the wedding-presents, the 
names and toilettes of the guests, and the num- 
ber of bottles of champagne opened at the mar- 
riage of some millionairess daughter. 

No wonder that this aristocracy of ours plumes 
itself on its importance, and takes itself seriously 
when it finds its slightest doings telegraphed 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It feels itself 
called to new efforts, for it understands with na- 
tive shrewdness that the American people re- 
quires novelty and fresh entertainment, or it 
looks elsewhere. Accordingly it is beginning to 
be unfaithful to its marriage vows. Until within 
a recent period the husbands and wives of this 
vapid society have, much to the bewilderment 
of warm-blooded students of manners and mor- 
als, been satisfied to flirt and produce the ap- 

[ 307 ] 



'The Art of Living 

pearance of infidelity, and yet only pretend. Now 
the divorce court and the whispered or public 
scandal bear frequent testimony to the fad: that 
it is not so fashionable or "smart" as it used to 
be merely to make believe. 

Was there ever a foreign court, when foreign 
courts were in their glory, where men and wo- 
men were content merely to whisper and giggle 
behind a rubber-tree in order to appear vicious ? 
It may be said at least that some of our fashion- 
ables have learned to be men and women instead 
of mere simpering marionettes. Still there was 
originality in being simpering marionettes: Mari- 
tal infidelity has been the favorite excitement of 
every rotten aristocracy which the world has 
ever seen. 



[308 ] 



The ConduSi of Life. 
II. 

«)» MANNER of life of this descrip- 
A JW ^^^^ ^^^ scarcely be the ideal of the 
^^^1 American people. Certainly neither 
^^H^ George Washington, when he deliv- 
ered his farewell address, nor Abraham Lincoln, 
on the occasion of his second inaugural, looked 
forward to the evolution of any such aristocracy 
as the fulfilment of the nation's hopes. And yet 
this coterie of people has its representatives in 
all the large cities of the country, and there is 
no reason to doubt that in a short time the ex- 
ample set will be imitated to some extent, at 
least, and that one portion of the country will 
vie with another in extravagant social vanities 
and prodigal display on the part of a pleasure- 
seeking leisure class. 

Most of these people go to church, and, in- 
deed, some of them are ostensibly regardful of 
church functions and ceremonies, and, as they 
do not openly violate any laws so as to subject 
themselves to terms of imprisonment, the patri- 
otic American citizen finds himself able merely 
to frown by way of showing his dissatisfadion 

[ 309 ] 



The Art of Living 

at this form of high treason against the morals 
and aims of democracy. To frown and to be 
grateful that one is not like certain pleasure- 
seeking millionaires is not much of a comfort, 
especially when it is obvious that the ignorant 
and semi-ignorant mass is fascinated by the ex- 
travagances and worldly manifestations of the in- 
dividuals in question, and has made them its he- 
roes on account of their unadulterated millions. 
Indeed, the self-respedling, patriotic American 
citizen finds himself to-day veritably between 
Scylla and Charybdis in the matter of the con- 
dud: of life. We are no longer the almost homo- 
geneous nation we were fifty years ago. There 
are far greater extremes of wealth and poverty. 
Our economic conditions, or at least the condi- 
tions which exist in our principal cities, are closely 
approximating those which exist in the cities of 
the Old World. Outside of our cities the people 
for the most part live in respectable comfort by 
the practice of what passes in America for econ- 
omy, which may be defined as a high but igno- 
rant moral purpose negatived by waste and do- 
mestic incompetence. It has always been true of 
our beloved country that, though the ship of 
state has seemed on the point of floundering 

[ 310 ] 



The ConduEi of Life 

from time to time, disaster has invariably been 
averted at critical jundtures by the saving grace 
of the common-sense and right-mindedness of 
the American people. This is not so complimen- 
tary as it sounds. It really means that the aver- 
age sense and intelligence of the public is apt to 
be in the wrong at the outset, and to be con- 
verted to the right only after many days and 
much tribulation. In other words, our safety and 
our progress have been the result of a slow and 
often reludant yielding of opinion by the mass 
to the superior judgment of a minority. This is 
merely another way of stating that, where every 
one has a right to individual opinion, and there 
are no arbitrary standards of condu6t or of any- 
thing else outside the statute law, the mean is 
likely to fall far short of what is best. Our sal- 
vation in every instance of national perplexity 
has been the eifedlual working on the public con- 
science of the leaven of the best Americanism. 
A comparatively small proportion of the popu- 
lation have been the pioneers in thought and sug- 
gestion of subsequent ardent espousals by the 
entire public. This leaven, in the days when we 
were more homogeneous, was made up from all 
the elements of society; or, in other words, the 

[3" ] 



The Art of Living 

best Americanism drew its representatives from 
every condition of life; the farmer of the West- 
ern prairie was just as likely to tower above his 
fellows and become a torch-bearer as the mer- 
chant or mechanic of the city. 

If we as a nation have needed a leaven in the 
past, we certainly have no less need of one to-day, 
now that we are in the flush of material prosper- 
ity and consciousness of power. Fortunately we 
have one. The public-spirited, nobly indepen- 
dent, earnest, conscientious, ambitious American 
exists to-day as indisputably and unmistakably 
as ever, and he is a finer specimen of humanity 
than he used to be, for he knows more and he 
poses much less. It is safe to assert, too, that he 
is still to be found in every walk of our national 
life. The existence of an aggravating and frivolous 
aristocracy on the surface, and an ignorant, un- 
aesthetic mass underneath should not blind us to 
the fad that there is a sound core to our social 
system. The hope of the United States to-day 
lies in that large minority of the people who are 
really trying to solve the problems of life from 
more than a merely selfish standpoint. One has 
merely to think a moment in order to realize 
what a really numerous and significant body 

[ 312 ] 



The ConduSi of Life 

among us is endeavoring to promote the cause 
of American civilization by aspiring or decent 
behavior. Our clergymen, our lawyers, our doc- 
tors, our archited:s, our merchants, our teachers, 
some of our editors, our bankers, our scientists, 
our scholars, and our philanthropists, at once 
stand out as a generally sane and earnest force 
of citizens. The great educational, charitable, ar- 
tistic, and other undertakings which have been 
begun and splendidly completed by individual 
energy and liberality since the death of Abraham 
Lincoln, bespeak eloquently the temper of a cer- 
tain portion of the community. If it be true that 
the so-called aristocracy of New York City threat- 
ens the repute and sincerity of democracy by its 
heartlessness and unworthy attempts to ape the 
vices of a fifteenth-century European nobility. 
New York can fairly retort that it offers in its 
working force of well-to-do people the most vi- 
tal, interesting, sympathetic, and effective force 
of men and women in the nation. If the Paris of 
America contains the most dangerous element 
of society, it also contains an element which is 
equal to the best elsewhere, and is more attrac- 
tive than any. The New York man or woman 
who is in earnest is sure to accomplish some- 

[ Z-'Z ] 



T^he Art of Living 

thing, for he or she is not likely to be handi- 
capped by ignorant provincialism of ethics or art 
which plays havoc with many of the good inten- 
tions of the rest of the country. 

This versatile and interesting leaven of Ameri- 
can society finds its counterpart, to a greater or 
less extent, in every se6lion of the United States, 
but it is nowhere quite so attradtive as in the Paris 
of America, for the reason that nowhere does the 
pulse of life move so keenly as there, and no- 
where is the science of living absorbingly so well 
understood. The art of living has there reached 
a more interesting phase than in any part of 
America, if zest in life and the facilities to make 
the most of it are regarded as the test. 

This may sound worldly. The people of the 
United States used to consider it worldly to 
admire pictures or to listen to beautiful music. 
Some think so still. Many a citizen of what was 
lately the prairie sits down to his dinner in his 
shirt-sleeves to-day and pretends to be thankful 
that he is neither an aristocrat nor a gold-bug. 
The next week, perhaps, this same citizen will 
vote against a national bankrupt law because he 
does not wish to pay his debts, or vote for a bill 
which will enable him to pay them in depreciated 

[314] 



The ConduSi of Life 

currency. Many a clergyman who knows better 
gives his flock consolingly to understand that to 
be absorbed in the best human interests of life 
is unworthy of the Christian, and that to be or- 
dinary and unattractive is a legitimate condition 
of mind and body. Surely the best Americanism 
is the Americanism of the man or woman who 
makes the most of what this life affords, and 
throws himself or herself keenly into the thick 
of it. The art of living is the science of living 
nobly and well, and how can one live either no- 
bly or well by regarding life on the earth as a 
mere log-cabin existence ? If we in this country 
who seek to live wisely are in danger from the 
extravagant vanities of the very rich, we are 
scarcely less menaced by that narrow spirit of 
ethical teaching which tries to inculcate that it 
does not much matter what our material sur- 
roundings are, and that any progress made by 
society, except in the direction of sheer morality, 
is a delusion and a snare. 

Charader is the basis and the indispensable re- 
quisite of the finest humanity; without it refine- 
ment, appreciation, manners, fancy, and power 
of expression are like so many boughs on a tree 
which is dead. But, on the other hand, what is 



"The Art of Living 

more uninspiring than an unadorned soul ? That 
kind of virtue and moraHty which finds no inter- 
est in the affairs of this life is but a fresh con- 
tribution to the sum of human incompetence, 
and but serves to retard the progress of civiliza- 
tion. The true and the chief reason why there is 
less misery in the world than formerly is that 
men understand better how to live. That straight- 
laced type of American, who is content to be 
moral in his own narrow way, and to exclude 
from his scheme of life all those interests which 
serve to refine and to inspire, bears the same re- 
lation to the ideal man or woman that a chromo 
bears to a masterpiece of painting. 

We have no standards in this country. The 
individual is free to express himself here within 
the law in any way he sees fit, and the conduct 
of life comes always at last to an equation of the 
individual. Each one of us when we awake in 
the morning finds the problem of existence star- 
ing him anew in the face, and cannot always spare 
the time to remember that he is an American. 
And yet Americanism is the sum total of what 
all of us are. It will be very easy for us simply 
to imitate the civilizations of the past, but if our 
civilization is to stand for anything vital, and to 

[316 ] 



The ConduSi of Life 

be a step forward in the progress of humanity, 
we must do more than use the old combinations 
and devices of society in a new kaleidoscopic 
form. Our heritage as Americans is indepen- 
dence, originality, self-reliance, and sympathetic 
energy animated by a strong ethical instind:, and 
these are forces which can produce a higher 
and a broader civilization than the world has yet 
seen if we choose to have it so. But it is no 
longer a matter of cutting down forests and open- 
ing mines, of boasting beside the plough and 
building cities in a single year, of fabulous for- 
tunes won in a trice, and of favorite sons in black 
broadcloth all the year round. It is a matter of 
a vast, populous country and a powerful, seeth- 
ing civilization where the same problems confront 
us which have taxed the minds and souls of the 
Old World for generations of men. It is for our 
originality to throw new light upon them, and 
it is for our independence to face them in the 
spirit of a deeper sympathy with humanity, and 
free from the canker of that utter selfishness 
which has made the prosperity and glory of other 
great nations culminate so often in a decadence 
of degrading luxury and fruitless culture. 

No civilization which regards the blessings and 

[ 317 ] 



The Art of Living 

comforts of refined living as unworthy to be 
striven for and appropriated can hope to pro- 
mote the cause of humanity. On the other hand, 
we Americans must remember that purely selfish 
appropriation and appreciation of these blessings 
and comforts has worked the ruin of the most 
famous civilizations of the past. Marie Antoi- 
nette was more elegant than the most fashionable 
woman in New York, and yet that did not save 
her from the tumbrel and the axe. The best 
Americanism of to-day and for the future is that 
which shall seek to use the fruits of the earth 
and the fulness thereof, and to develop all the 
manifestations of art and gentle living in the in- 
terest of humanity as a whole. But even heart- 
less elegance is preferable to that self-righteous 
commonness of spirit which sits at home in its 
shirt-sleeves and is graceless, ascetic, and unim- 
aginative in the name of God. 

T H e E N T> 



D. B. Updike 

The Merrymount Press 

104 Chestnut Street 

Boston 



LB D '05 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 184 825 2 # 



